Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays 9781472574886, 9781472574879, 9781474298964, 9781472574893

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Also Available from Bloomsbury
Title
Copyright
Contents
Note on the Texts
Note on the Translators
Editor’s Introduction
1 Of Habit
2 Contemporary Philosophy
3 Essay on Stoicism
4 The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci
5 On the Teaching of Drawing
6 The Venus de Milo
7 Greek Funerary Monuments
8 Mysteries: Fragment of a Study of the History of Religions
9 Pascal’s Philosophy
10 Metaphysics and Morals
11 Philosophical Testament
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Félix Ravaisson

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Being and Event, Alain Badiou Conditions, Alain Badiou Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou Key Writings, Henri Bergson Principles of Non-Philosophy, François Laruelle From Communism to Capitalism, Michel Henry Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri The Five Senses, Michel Serres Statues, Michel Serres Rome, Michel Serres Leibniz on God and Religion: A Reader, edited by Lloyd Strickland Art and Fear, Paul Virilio Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio Althusser’s Lesson, Jacques Rancière Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancière Dissensus, Jacques Rancière The Lost Thread, Jacques Rancière Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière Of Habit, Félix Ravaisson

Félix Ravaisson Selected Essays Edited by Mark Sinclair

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This collection first published 2016 English translation of Félix Ravaisson excerpts © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016 Selection and Editorial Matter © Mark Sinclair, 2016 Mark Sinclair has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

9781472574886 9781472574879 9781472574893 9781472574909

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

Note on the Texts  vi Note on the Translators  viii Editor’s Introduction  1

1 Of Habit  31 2 Contemporary Philosophy  59 3 Essay on Stoicism  85 4 The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci  145 5 On the Teaching of Drawing  159 6 The Venus de Milo  189 7 Greek Funerary Monuments  229 8 Mysteries: Fragment of a Study of the History of Religions  243 9 Pascal’s Philosophy  253 10 Metaphysics and Morals  279 11 Philosophical Testament  295 Bibliography  337 Index  341

Note on the Texts

‘Of Habit’ was first published as De l’habitude in Paris by H. Fournier in 1838. The translation here is modified, by Mark Sinclair, from his 2008 (London: Continuum) translation with Clare Carlisle. ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, translated by Jeremy Dunham, was originally published as ‘Philosophie Contemporaine: Fragmens de Philosophie par M. Hamilton’ in La Revue des deux mondes 1840, pp. 397–427. ‘Essay on Stoicism’, translated by Adi Efal and Mark Sinclair, was first published as Mémoire sur le Stoïcisme, Mémoires de l’Institut Impériale de France, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. XXI, 1857, pp. 1–94. ‘The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci’ is a translation, by Mark Sinclair, of the first, untitled main section of ‘Rapport addressé à M. le ministre de l’Instruction publique et des cultes’, 28 December 1853, published in 1854 as De l’enseignement du dessin dans les lycées (Paris: Dupont). ‘On the Teaching of Drawing’, translated by Tullio Viola and Mark Sinclair, was originally published under the heading ‘L’enseignement du dessin d’après M. F. Ravaisson’ within the entry ‘Dessin’ of F. Buisson (ed.), Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette), pp. 671–84, in 1882. ‘The Venus de Milo’, translated by Mark Sinclair, is the third section, pp. 188–256, of La Venus de Milo in Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1892, vol. XXXIV, Part I, pp. 145–256, which was also published as an off-print by Klincksieck, Paris, in the same year. ‘Greek Funerary Monuments’, translated by Mark Sinclair, was originally published as ‘Les monuments funéraires des Grecs’ in Revue politique et littéraire. Revue bleue, 10 April 1880, vol. XVIII, pp. 963–70. ‘Mysteries: Fragment of a Study of the History of Religions’, translated by Mark Sinclair, was originally published as ‘Les mystères. Fragment d’une étude sur l’histoire des religions’ in Revue politique et littéraire. Revue bleue, 19 March 1892, pp. 362–6, and appeared as an off-print (Paris: Picard) the same year. ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’, translated by Mark Sinclair, was published as ‘La philosophie de Pascal’ in La Revue des deux mondes 80, 1887, pp. 399–428. ‘Metaphysics and Morals’, originally published as ‘Métaphysique et Morale’ and translated by Mark Sinclair, was the lead essay in the inaugural issue of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1893, pp. 6–25.



Note on the Texts vii

‘Philosophical Testament’, translated by Jeremy Dunham and Mark Sinclair, was first edited and published by Xavier Léon in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9/1 (1901), pp. 1–31, and a second, expanded edition of the text, which is reproduced here, appeared thanks to Charles Devivaise in 1933 (Paris: Boivin).

Note on the Translators

Jeremy Dunham is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield Philosophy Department. He has written several articles on nineteenth-century French philosophy, including ‘From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance’ and ‘Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe: William James and Charles Renouvier’, both in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. He is currently working on the importance of basement level cognitive processes (habits, instincts, etc.) for perception, thought and reasoning in pragmatist and idealist philosophy. Adi Efal is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the a.r.t.e.s humanities graduate school at the University of Cologne. Her work circles around art historiography, art theory and the history of concepts. Mark Sinclair is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and Associate Editor at the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. He is the author of a number of essays on the French ‘spiritualist’ tradition, and is currently working on a monograph on Ravaisson that will also contribute to the contemporary metaphysics of powers. Tullio Viola is a researcher (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)  in philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, where he was awarded his PhD in 2015, after studying in Pisa, Lyon and Berlin. He works on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, American Pragmatism, the philosophy of culture and aesthetics.

Introduction Whether or not the nineteenth century is or still is the most obscure, as Martin Heidegger once remarked, of all the centuries of modernity,1 among contemporary Anglophone philosophers nineteenth-century French philosophy is much less well known than the German, British or North American thinking of the same period. Henri Bergson’s celebrity early in the twentieth century produced a few English-language studies of the recent history of French philosophy, but the decline of Bergson’s influence left the tradition that he develops in an almost complete obscurity.2 After the English translation of Félix Ravaisson’s seminal 1838 doctoral dissertation Of Habit in 2008,3 the present volume of essays by a figure who was in many ways France’s most influential philosopher in the second half of the century, and who was pivotal in the ‘spiritualist’ tradition that runs from Maine de Biran at the beginning of the century to Bergson at its end, should dissipate some more of this obscurity. It contains the most important of the shorter pieces – in philosophy, certainly, but also in art-theory, archaeology, pedagogy, theology and the history of religions – that Ravaisson wrote from the beginning of his long career to his death in 1900. The volume should therefore facilitate the nascent English-language reception of Ravaisson’s work as a whole, and provide increased historical context to the recent, second wave of English-language Bergson studies. Ravaisson – whose full name became Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien – was born in 1813 in Namur, then in France, where his father, François-AmbroiseDamien Laché-Ravaisson, was city treasurer. His parents left the city when French rule of Belgium ended with Napoleon’s defeat the following year, and his father, déclassé in that he was unable to obtain a comparable position, died the year after that. His mother, Pauline-Gaspard Mollien, though related to Nicolas-François Mollien, Treasury Minister under Napoleon, was left to raise her two sons while managing an office of the Royal Lottery in Dunkerque. Both boys gained a taste from her for music and the arts; her younger son, the future philosopher, was taught to paint also by students of David, and would later exhibit his own work at the Paris Salon under the name Laché.4 Her brother, Gaspard-Théodore Mollien, an explorer who wrote popular books about his adventures in the jungles of Senegal (and who survived the legendary 1816 Medusa shipwreck famously painted by Géricault), took a special interest in his gifted younger nephew’s education, and Ravaisson, much later, added his uncle’s surname to his own.5 After brilliant success at the Collège Rollin in Paris – in 1833 he won first prize in the philosophy section of a national competition, the Concours général des collèges de



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France, with a dissertation on method – Ravaisson began his studies at university at a time when Victor Cousin’s ‘spiritualist eclecticism’ was coming to dominate French philosophy. With the narrow sensualism and naturalism of the Ideological school, French philosophy had been ‘in a hole’,6 but when Cousin began to emphasize the free activity and moral autonomy of the mind, in a manner that was seen to be as anticlerical as it was antimaterialist, he seemed to offer philosophical renewal. Upon the July revolution of 1830 establishing a liberal constitutional monarchy, and after having been barred from teaching under the Bourbon restoration because of his liberalism, Cousin rose to an almost total control of the institutions of philosophy in France: Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne and director of the École Normale Supérieure, as well as Peer in France’s upper house and member of the Royal Commission on Public Education, in 1840 he became President of the Jury of the agrégation – the competitive examination for positions in the state education system – in philosophy and, briefly, Minister of Public Instruction. Cousin worked to reform French education and establish philosophy within it as a serious, historically orientated discipline taught methodically at university and in the lycées. He did this while defending the discipline against attacks from traditionalists who would have preferred to see philosophy return to being a handmaiden of theology, and from republicans who, deriding the new ranks of ‘salaried philosophers’, the ranks of what Cousin described as his ‘regiment’, demanded that philosophy serve socialist political objectives.7 The combined effect of Cartesianism, the Revolution and the Ideological school had meant that philosophy in France had lost contact with much of its history, and Cousin – translator of Plato and Proclus – did important work rediscovering the tradition. With this renewed historical awareness, Cousin’s ‘spiritualist’ philosophy took the form of an ‘eclecticism’, according to which all possible philosophical positions fall under the four headings of idealism, materialism, scepticism and mysticism. The history of philosophy is the expression of these archetypes, and the task of thinking in the present consists in synthesizing the truths, and rejecting the errors, to be found in each of them. If both materialism and mysticism were to different degrees to be rejected (in time Cousin would accommodate revealed, Christian religion), this critical enterprise was to be grounded on a synthesis of idealism and scepticism. Cousin proposed to resolve the differences between German idealist philosophy, particularly the work of F. W. J. Schelling, and British empiricism, particularly the Scottish common-sense school. A spiritualist and eclectic philosophy had to preserve itself from the excesses of idealist speculation and empiricist scepticism, while synthesizing both by means of a certain liberal bon sens, just as the July monarchy represented, according to the ‘Citizen King’ LouisPhilippe, a juste milieu, a liberal middle-of-the-road between the figures of reaction and socialist republicanism that had crystallized in France.8 Ravaisson came directly into Cousin’s orbit in 1835, when, at the age of twentyone, he was the winner – the joint winner, since the prize was also awarded to

Introduction 3

Carl-Ludwig Michelet, a disciple of Hegel’s and Extraordinary Professor in Berlin9 – of a competition concerning Aristotle’s Metaphysics instigated by Cousin at the newly reinstated Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (Napoleon’s animus against the Idéologues had led to its closure in 1803). Candidates were to illuminate the Metaphysics by analysing its structure and content, by ‘accounting for its history, showing its influence on later systems in Antiquity and Modernity’, and by ‘discussing the share of truth and the share of falsity to be found within it’.10 This brief may appear impossibly broad for contemporary specialists, but it was crucial to renew study of the Metaphysics, since, as Ravaisson notes, this foundational text had been subject to ‘general discredit for over two centuries in France, due to the thick veils in which scholasticism had enveloped it’.11 The situation was quite different across the Rhine, and Ravaisson, an autodidact in his Aristotelianism, responded to recent German philological and philosophical scholarship on the Metaphysics and the history of philosophy.12 He was also markedly influenced – perhaps largely indirectly at this stage, through this historical scholarship – by Schelling’s philosophy of identity, by the idea that philosophy can access, in an ‘intellectual intuition’, an absolute that constitutes the prior ground, the identity in difference, of mind and world. Schelling is cited in this dissertation submitted in 1834, Ravaisson’s first major work of philosophy, and also in his last, ‘Philosophical Testament’ (Chapter 11 of the present volume), but the extent of the influence of both Schelling’s early philosophy of identity and his later ‘positive philosophy’ on Ravaisson’s intellectual development is uncertain. The extent to which there is here influence rather than merely a kind of natural affinity is a ‘nice problem in the history of ideas’.13 It is clear, at the very least, that the German philosopher was right, when he read Cousin’s report on the Aristotle competition, to sense something of a kindred spirit in the young French thinker.14 It is also clear that Schelling’s critical preface to a volume of Cousin’s work, which Ravaisson translated at Cousin’s behest in 1835 during a brief period when he worked as the latter’s secretary, helped the young French philosopher discern the limitations of the Eclectic project. In his brief introduction to this translation, Ravaisson describes Schelling as the ‘greatest philosopher of our century’.15 In 1836 Ravaisson passed the agrégation in philosophy in first place, and in Cousin’s estimation, which possibly was sensitive to Ravaisson’s snub, the laureate was hors de ligne, far above the rest but also ‘out of line’.16 In the following year, he published a substantially reworked first part of his Aristotle dissertation as Volume I of his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. A second volume studying the fate of Aristotelianism in Greek thinking up to and including Neoplatonism appeared in 1846, but both the projected third and fourth volumes tracing its reception in the three great monotheisms until the end of the Middle Ages and in modernity, respectively, never appeared.17 On certain points, Ravaisson’s philological contributions to study of the Metaphysics in the first volume are, as Pierre Aubenque has noted,



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‘still authoritative’, whereas his attempt to systematize Aristotle’s ontological and theological doctrine is more free than immediately faithful.18 It is hardly controversial to state that Aristotle resists the idealist abstractions of Pythagoreanism and Platonism by attempting to apprehend the individuality of the particular being as being in a primary sense; and that he thus attempts to redeem the natural world of particular things in their change and movement. On Ravaisson’s reading, however, Aristotle does this in considering the natural thing, which has ‘in itself the principle of its own movement’, as structured by an immanent teleological principle that is l’âme, soul or spirit; ‘the internal principle of change, nature is … spirit’.19 This claim, according to which all moving things are ensouled, may well amount, as Aubenque has it, to failing to see that hylozoism is not co-extensive with hylomorphism in Aristotle, and that on this point the Philosopher perceives an analogy rather than identity: the soul is to the body like form is to matter.20 In any case, Ravaisson adopts Aristotle’s hylomorphic conception of spirit: it is ‘not a substance …, a subject’, which is to say that it is not an extra thing existing behind the scenes, beneath appearances, but is ‘a form, the form of a singular (un seul et unique) body whose individuality and life it constitutes’.21 In this way, Ravaisson grapples with the traditional Aristotelian problem of the principle of individuation: this cannot be matter, indeterminate and next to nothing, but nor can it simply be form, inherently general. Spirit is not independent of body, is ‘something of the body’, and though not simply form, is the ‘unity of form and actuality’.22 Ravaisson thus recognizes the centrality of Aristotle’s interpretation of being as energeia, ‘actuality’, and his spiritualization of Aristotle’s physics finds its main justification in the account of pure actuality within the Metaphysics’ theology. Given that the supreme being as pure energeia – actuality unadulterated by matter, movement and potentiality – is noein, thought necessarily thinking of nothing but itself, and given that the actuality of the physical world is different not in kind but only in purity to the actuality of this principal being, the path is open to a ‘noetic’, spiritualist and unitary interpretation of Aristotle’s ontotheology. Aristotle thinks being in the highest sense as energeia, but, according to Ravaisson’s panpsychist position, actuality, everywhere, is ‘thought’, but not always of a self-conscious variety. Ravaisson reads Aristotle in this sense as a thinker of continuity, of a graduated chain of spiritual being that begins even in the lowest, apparently inert and randomly formed matter to the highest being: [nature] can free itself only by degrees from the ties of matter and necessity. It tends towards its goal and never loses sight of it; but it cannot immediately raise itself up to it. It is only by an ascending progression of forms that it attains the highest form. A scale of existences is developed which fills, without leaving a void, the whole category of substance and Being. It is like one and the same power, from organism to organism, from soul to soul, that climbs in a continuous movement to the peak of pure activity; it is being emerging gradually from stupor and sleep.23

Introduction 5

This ascending progression, however, consists of a – decidedly Germanic – odyssey of spirit involving a form of undeveloped immediacy, a form of alienation and then its overcoming. Desire in nature – whereby the natural being realizes its goal instinctively, without reflection and more or less immediately – becomes increasingly separated from its goal in human, voluntary consciousness, but finds a new, perfect immediacy in the highest being: ‘first, unity, confused unity, matter and sensibility; next the oppositions and abstractions of the understanding; finally the individuality and superior unity of reason in its immaterial form of pure activity.’24 Ravaisson draws on Aristotle’s theology in spiritualizing his physics, but the continuist onto-theology that he thus discovers conflicts with the Philosopher’s own statements concerning the separation of the divine from the world, which It moves, in producing desire, without Itself being moved. In the Essay’s first volume, Ravaisson recognizes that Aristotle’s ‘Prime Mover is not a soul of the world; it is a principle superior to the world, separate from matter, foreign to change and time, and which envelops things, without resting on them’,25 but he does not dwell on the challenge this poses to his own interpretation. In the second volume, however, he develops the problem: ‘if the first principle is … separated from nature’, if ‘it is only an end that natural powers tend and move towards’, then ‘from where do these powers obtain the desire that moves them? How to attribute to them, if they are outside the sole veritable being, this sort of being and reality?’26 A transcendent God, Ravaisson now seems to think, will undermine the essence of Aristotelian physics. Ravaisson argues that this problem is pivotal in the development – the decline – of Greek philosophy after Aristotle: as, in the face of this problem, ‘Aristotle’s own school gradually abandons the characteristic idea of his metaphysics, the pure actuality of absolute thought’, the path is opened to Epicurean and Stoic materialisms. This decline of Aristotelianism could have been avoided had the Philosopher posited the continuity of, and thus the immanence of, the divine principle in nature. This would allow for a kind of identity in difference of divinity and the world: a philosophy of continuity can posit their pantheistic identity but at the same time, as Ravaisson will write later, ‘gradation saves difference’.27 1837 also saw Ravaisson submit – he must have been working ferociously – ‘Of Habit’ (Chapter 1 of the present volume), together with a secondary work in Latin on Speusippus,28 as his doctoral theses. There exists no official record of Ravaisson’s thesis defence, but Ernest Bersot, then a student at the École Normale Supérieure, later wrote this about it: Ravaisson, nourished early on by Aristotle and endowed with a mind strong enough to penetrate the concision of this great genius, was tempted to imitate this concision and wrote a doctoral thesis, Of Habit, in the manner of the master. This thesis … much troubled the judges and I can still remember Jouffroy’s profound consternation and the vivacity with which he protested against this novelty. But the thesis was remarkable, remarkably defended; Ravaisson obtained his doctorate, his text



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provoked curiosity outside, and many desired to obtain the key to this language; many, in turn, wanted to use it.29

Ravaisson’s thesis was not wholly well received: its aphoristic and even oracular style – and doubtless its freedom in relation to Eclectic orthodoxy – perplexed Théodore Jouffroy, a leading light of the Eclectic school. Nevertheless, Ravaisson’s capacity to synthesize a range of philosophical influences in an original philosophical work, and to present a general metaphysics based on reflection on a particular, principally psychological phenomenon, was undeniable. His is one of the few doctoral theses – and in the mid-nineteenth century submitting an indigestible block of 500 pages was not yet required – that can be considered a philosophical classic. ‘Of Habit’ develops the remarks concerning habit as ‘desire’ in the earlier Essai and rearticulates the philosophy of nature that Ravaisson found in Aristotle.30 The continued influence of Schelling’s philosophy of identity is apparent, and would hardly be clearer were the German philosopher cited by name, in that Ravaisson’s fundamental metaphysical concern is to elucidate the ‘mystery of the identification of the ideal and the real, of the thing and thought, and of all the contraries that the understanding separates’; reflection on habit is here a means of thinking beneath and beyond the dualisms of freedom and necessity, mind and body, and will and nature that condition modern thought. In late 1839, Ravaisson would finally spend several weeks in Munich in order to consult with Schelling and learn about his latest work.31 That the German philosopher is not cited by name in the texts of 1837 – in neither the published volume of the Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote nor the dissertation on habit – would seem to be the result of, rather than the anxiety of influence, prudence on the part of a young philosopher and doctoral candidate, since Cousin had already come under attack for Germanizing French philosophy by importing post-Kantian thinking, and since Ravaisson will again be candid about Schelling’s significance in 1840. Other sources cited rather than just paraphrased, however, serve to clarify Ravaisson’s approach to Aristotle: Leibniz is crucial for his theory of the continuum, his dynamics, and his account of petites perceptions.32 Ravaisson’s philosophy of nature is also shaped by an attempt to synthesize the views of a range of animist and vitalist doctors from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century.33 The most important new philosophical influence on Ravaisson’s thinking in 1838, however, was Pierre Maine de Biran, whose voluntarist philosophical psychology had broken free of the Ideological school at the beginning of the century. Biran published little in his lifetime, but he began with a prize-winning dissertation submitted to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques on its question concerning the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking.34 Ravaisson takes up Biran’s tentative conjectures in 1802 on the ‘causes’ of habit, as well as the general philosophy of effort further developed in his later work, according to which the ‘primitive fact’ of consciousness, a dual ‘fact’ of a different order to those of objective experience, consists in the active will meeting resistance.35

Introduction 7

Ravaisson bases his approach on the ‘law’ that Biran, as well as others before him, had apprehended in habit: continued or repeated action becomes less conscious but more spontaneous, assured and precise; continued sensation, in also becoming less conscious, produces a need, which is manifest when the source of the sensation is removed – as when, on a journey, we wake up when the car has come to a stop. Both aspects of the law, Ravaisson argues, are resistant to physiological or psychological, realist or intellectual explanation; and both are the result of an ‘obscure activity’, a force intermediate between pure activity and pure passivity. The gradual decline of effort, and thus consciousness, in the acquisition of a motor habit shows us that this obscure activity is continuous with and not antithetical to the will and consciousness; an acquired habit does not become ‘the mechanical effect of an external impulse, but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will’. The movement becomes a tendency, an inclination or propensity to act, a now pre-theoretical orientation to goals or possibilities previously posited in reflective consciousness. An acquired motor habit is not, therefore, ‘the fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’, as Bergson, memorably, would interpret Ravaisson to say – thereby expressing his own more dualist and mechanistic conception of habit – in the influential discourse he delivered in 1904 after taking his seat at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.36 As much as habit naturalizes spirit, it also spirit­ ualizes nature; habit is the ‘descent’ – and this idea of descent is important in relation to his later conception of ‘condescendence’ – of spirit into matter. It is precisely insofar as an acquired habit is not fossilized, dead or mechanical that Ravaisson can argue that reflection on habit is ‘the only real method … for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will’. This method certainly involves the difficult attempt to describe within conscious philosophical reflection that which by its nature begins to transcend the understanding, namely tendency or inclination. Yet Ravaisson appeals to our experience of becoming habituated, of becoming inclined, as an experience wherein we glimpse a vital spontaneity continuous with both organic nature and consciousness. Consequently, and by the ‘strongest of analogies’, it is possible to argue that the continuum underlying traditional mind-matter dualisms, a continuum that reflection on habit allows us to apprehend, is present throughout nature as a whole. Though his brilliant doctoral thesis had met some resistance, many would have expected Ravaisson to establish a fine university career. But he would never teach philosophy. In 1838 he became principle private secretary to Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, Minister of Public Instruction and one of Cousin’s political enemies, and although in the following year he was nominated at the University of Rennes, far from Paris, he decided not to pursue an academic career. This decision was perhaps motivated by ‘preferring a life more worldly, more elevated, more brilliant, far from the near impoverishment of professors’,37 but that Rennes was the only academic post



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open to him indicates that his relations with Cousin, discouragingly, had soured. Already in 1837, Ravaisson was seen to be one of Cousin’s ‘victims’.38 To explain this dissension, one might point, following Bergson, to a difference in temperament, and contrast Cousin, the ebullient rhetorician, with Ravaisson, of a more philosophical, even ethereal nature, who would have gained the sobriquet ‘Lion’ only for the way he wore his hair. One might also invoke personal allegiances: Ravaisson’s original philosophical mentor at the Collège Rollin, Hector Poret, who became his friend and, later, father-in-law, also had frosty relations with Cousin after deputizing for him at the Sorbonne. Yet Ravaisson’s differences with Cousin were above all philosophical, and the 1840 essay on ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ (Chapter 2 of the present volume) sheds light on the dispute. This essay, as pellucid as ‘Of Habit’ is poetic and oracular, is, in effect, a manifesto against Eclecticism and it created a stir. Its occasion was a French translation of the work of William Hamilton, product of the Scottish common-sense school and Professor at the University of Edinburgh, who had criticized – initially in the Edinburgh Review of October 1829 – Cousin’s attempt to use the Baconian experimental method of observation and induction in order to attain the goals of German idealism, i.e. knowledge of the ‘absolute’. Schelling, in the 1835 preface that Ravaisson had translated, made essentially the same point, but from the opposite perspective, and thus, as Ravaisson puts it, German philosophy ‘approves of the end but disapproves of the means’, while Scottish philosophy holds the ‘end to be chimerical and regards the procedure with which Cousin wants to attain it as a false application of a true method’. Cousin thus finds himself subject to criticism from both sides, and after damning him with faint praise – he has a ‘grand imagination; he likes high peaks, vast horizons’ – Ravaisson makes no secret of his own view that the Eclectic synthesis is impossible. A little-known reformer of empiricism, however, is able to lead French philosophy out of this Eclectic impasse: Maine de Biran. It is precisely in attacking Hume’s purported extension to psychology of a ‘Newtonian’, experimental method that Biran advances his philosophy of effort and active will.39 Biran teaches us to renounce considering the mind ‘from the objective point of view, and as somehow belonging to the outside’, and to recognize, pace Hume, that in experience there is a direct intuition or apperception of a force, namely the force of the will in its meeting resistance. Cousin may well have attempted to incorporate Biran’s thinking, but, for Ravaisson, he has done so in a way that is as half-hearted as his decision in 1834 to begin to edit Biran’s unpublished manuscripts, which he had held in his possession for over ten years.40 Incorporation of Biran’s philosophy of the will requires renunciation of the Scottish experimental psychological method, and only thus, Ravaisson argues, can French philosophy gain common ground with the ideas of agency and activity advanced across the Rhine by both J. G. Fichte and Schelling; and only thus can it adequately resolve the problems of philosophical method addressed under the heading of ‘intellectual intuition’. By means of Biran’s

Introduction 9

philosophy, therefore, ‘France and Germany, by such different routes, have encountered each other again, and the country of Descartes seems near to uniting itself in thought, dare I say in heart and soul, with the country of Leibniz’. ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ is important not just for showing how its author envisages a union of nineteenth-century French and German philosophy, but also for underlining the originality of Ravaisson’s own thinking in its departure from Biran’s voluntarism. In its final pages, Ravaisson writes: ‘[e]ffort supposes, as Maine de Biran recognized himself, an anterior tendency that, in its development, provokes resistance.’ Ravaisson refers here to Biran’s account of the genesis of effort on the basis of what – despite the phenomenological rigour of his analyses – he posited as a pre-existing and objective world independent of consciousness.41 Resistance presupposes will, and will resistance, and in order to avoid a ‘vicious circle’ in accounting for the advent of consciousness we must posit ‘that the first movements of the sentient being are determined by instinct, an internal force that is quite real, quite independent … of the will strictly speaking; but the movements whose execution must subsequently be guided by the will, cannot take place by the instinctive act without the individual being aware of it by this particular impression (that we name effort)’.42 Biran, then, sees the need to establish some continuity between the organic and ‘hyper-organic’ strata he otherwise consistently separates, and thus he posits an instinctive effort that awakens voluntary effort. This move is problematic, for it undermines the specificity of the idea of effort in Biran’s philosophy, and ‘Of Habit’ presents instead the idea of an ‘effortless antecedent tendency’. It is, thus, far from clear that Biran thinks instinct as a tendency in Ravaisson’s sense, but ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ marks out more decisively its author’s distance from Biran’s philosophy when it characterizes the essence of tendency as desire: ‘the will has its source and substance in desire, and it is desire that constitutes the reality of the very experience of will’, for the ‘notion of an object as a good presupposes in the subject that wants it the feeling that it is desirable’. Ravaisson deduces here what reflection on habit had demonstrated: desire is continuous with, but prior to, voluntary action and thought. This entails that ‘before the good is a motif in the soul, it is already, as if by a prevenient grace, a motive, but a motive that does not differ from the soul itself ’. Tendency, then, is to be thought as desire that somehow touches and even constitutes the being that desires, but desire is still not the ‘ultimate source’ of the will; in order to desire something ‘in some way we have to put into it its own goodness and felicity; we have to be aware of ourselves in it, to feel ourselves, at bottom, already united with it, and to aspire to reunite ourselves there again; this is to say that desire envelops every degree of love’. Love, as Ravaisson had written in ‘Of Habit’, ‘possesses and desires at the same time’, and it is the very condition of desire. Biran, then, is a philosopher of will, whereas Ravaisson is led, through an idea of tendency and desire, to a conception of love, which develops his interpretation of Aristotle’s onto-theology, and which will be crucial in his later work. In any case, ‘Contemporary Philosophy’

10

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seems to authorize the following, doubtless unsatisfying, analogy: Ravaisson is to Biran as Schelling is to Fichte; and if Biran is the ‘French Fichte’,43 it would not be absurd to describe Ravaisson as the French Schelling. After his precocious philosophical beginnings, ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, closes a chapter in Ravaisson’s life and work. He would not again have such a direct effect on the contemporary philosophical scene before a quarter-century had passed. In the 1840s, he continued to labour on the second volume of his Essai on Aristotle, when he was not occupied by his duties as Inspecteur général des bibliothèques, a newly created post to which he was appointed in 1839 after de Salvandy had resigned as Minister. This post was certainly not a sinecure, but nor was it one that Ravaisson would have accepted with a heavy heart, solely in order to fund his scholarly activities and well-connected Parisian life. The position involved cataloguing the holdings of exceptional interest in libraries and archives throughout France, and allowed Ravaisson to pursue his interest in history developed through his intellectual friendships with the historians Jules Michelet – translator of Giambattista Vico, whose historical periodization and notion of ‘common knowledge’ was significant (see ‘Metaphysics and Morals’, Chapter 10 of this volume) for Ravaisson’s later work – and Edgar Quinet.44 Ravaisson’s duties allowed him, more specifically, to develop his preoccupations in the history of Christian doctrine. In the summer of 1840, he was tasked – by Cousin, Minister from March to October – with the inspection of libraries in the west of France, and to his report of the following year Ravaisson appended some of his manuscript discoveries:45 these include unknown variants of Cicero’s works and one of Voltaire’s letters, but over half of them concern the history of Christian doctrine, including two sermons Ravaisson attributed to Augustin, and a long sermon by John Eriugena on the beginning of St John’s gospel, presented as a ‘new monument to the genius of this famous founder of the mystical philosophy and theology of the middle ages’.46 In the 1840s Ravaisson was twice rejected as a candidate for the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques; Cousin was President, but Ravaisson also sensed that his interests might appear too ‘mystical’ for the philosophy section of that Académie.47 He would have to wait until 1880 to be received into it. In 1849, however, he was elected into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the wing of the Institut de France primarily concerned with classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 1849 and 1851 he read to this Académie his ‘Essay on Stoicism’ (Chapter 3 of the present volume), which he then had published by its press as a long, intensely scholarly essay in 1856. The early to mid-nineteenth century was a period of decline in the study of Stoicism, ‘with German classical scholars and historians of philosophy interested more in Plato and Aristotle than the Hellenistic schools’, even though, as John Sellars also writes, ‘one might note in particular the work of the French philosopher Félix Ravaisson’ as an exception.48 This lack of interest was a function of a negative, critical attitude towards the Stoic philosophers.49 Ravaisson,

Introduction 11

despite the remarkable depth and detail of his study, shares in some measure this attitude, which he had already expressed in the second volume of his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. Felicitously, for us, ‘Essay on Stoicism’ summarizes the two volumes: after presenting Aristotle as the veritable founder of metaphysics, Ravaisson shows how Stoicism, following Epicureanism, falls away from the inner truth of the Philosopher’s problematic onto-theological doctrine. Ravaisson illuminates the interconnectedness of Stoic metaphysical and ethical doctrines, but, on his reading, Stoicism presents an ‘intricate web of paradoxes’, principal among which is its attempt to understand metaphysical principles as physical; ‘[f]orced by reason always to go beyond phenomena falling under the senses to a prior cause of unity, while refusing to recognize as real the entirely simple unity of what is purely intelligible, the Stoic stops half way, with an idea of an unknown cause, which is material and extended, and at the same time one and indivisible, a cause that thus reunites, thanks to its obscurity, the irreconcilable attributes of the corporeal and the incorporeal’. Ravaisson is certainly intrigued by Stoic immanentism as a response to Aristotle’s problematic onto-theology, by its notion of ‘tension’ in particular, and he seems to write the essay as if testing an interesting hypothesis. Yet no physics, in his view, can ever replace metaphysics. Ravaisson’s administrative career granted him in 1853 the opportunity to write philosophically about something that he had always practised, namely the art of drawing. Newly appointed under the Second Empire as Inspecteur général de l’éducation supérieure, he presided over a commission – which included the painter Delacroix and the architect Viollet le Duc among others – tasked with reporting to Hyppolite Fortoul, Napoleon III’s first Minister of Public Instruction, on the reform of the teaching of drawing in schools. Ravaisson’s views held sway, and he wrote the report of over seventy pages in his own name. In its first part (produced here as Chapter 4, ‘The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci’),50 Ravaisson outlines a philosophy of the figurative arts with an interpretative paraphrase of the maestro’s A Treatise on Painting. The art of drawing is contrasted with the analytic, scientific spirit of geometry, for art is concerned with a quality that geometry, focused on quantity, cannot see. Prior to, and the condition of, visible form and proportion is movement, which it is the vocation of art to express; drawing is primarily a function, in Leonardo’s words, of the good judgement of the eye, which, for Ravaisson, has the task of interpreting the ‘silent language of visible appearances’, so as to bring forth the movement, life and spirit of things. This living, moving spirit is grace, which, as Ravaisson will say after La Fontaine, is more ‘beautiful than beauty itself ’. In thus ‘not restricting itself to reproducing the letter of the forms and proportions, and in expressing the sense, the character, the spirit proper to things, art raises itself from imitation to interpretation’. Aristotle, in the Poetics, certainly saw something essential in remarking that art or poetry is more philosophical than history, but art has a higher mission than merely reporting on the general rather than the particular.

12

Félix Ravaisson

Figurative art can interpretatively access, Ravaisson argues, the individuality of the particular being that, for Aristotle, is being in a higher sense. This was the first expression of Ravaisson’s ardent interest in the philosophy and pedagogy of drawing, and he presented these ideas in their most developed form in his article ‘On the Teaching of Drawing’ (Chapter 5 of the present volume) that he contributed to Ferdinand Buisson’s 1882 Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire.51 Drawing divines the inner individuality of its object by grasping its serpeggiamento, as Leonardo had put it, its serpentine line: this is ‘in each object, the particular manner in which a flexuous line’ is ‘its generating axis … like one main wave unfurling in little surface waves’. This snaking movement, this flexuous line, which geometry cannot capture and is the principle of life itself, is not any one of the visible lines of the object, but rather a ‘super-physical, metaphysical’ secret that artistic intuition can capture; it is a ‘sovereign line that commands all other lines … that lets itself be divined rather than show itself, and that exists more for the imagination and thought than for the eyes’. Bergson is right to underline in his admirable discourse on Ravaisson’s life and work – which he was not compelled to publish as the final essay of his final book – that this reflection on drawing is not ancillary but rather essential to his predecessor’s mature philosophy: ‘[t]he whole of Ravaisson’s philosophy derives from the idea that art is a figurative metaphysics, that metaphysics is a reflection on art, and that it is the same intuition, applied differently, which makes the profound philosopher and the great artist.’52 Ravaisson’s account of habit as the ‘sole true method in philosophy’ seemed to depart knowingly from Schelling’s promotion of art as the ‘organon and document of philosophy’, but by the mid-1850s the French philosopher has come to his own particular view that figurative art can grant us access to the non-generic, spiritual essence of things: ‘aesthetics’, as Ravaisson will write in ‘Philosophical Testament’ (Chapter 11 of this volume), ‘is the torch of science’. It is the generative axis of things that, in the practice of drawing, is expressed through the vision of the artist and the movement of her hands. Thus what in modernity is called ‘genius’ cannot be a principle of ex nihilo creation, deriving from nothing but the artist herself – as Gabriel Séailles will underline in his 1886 Le génie dans l’art,53 dedicated to Ravaisson – and is rather a kind of revelation or divination, at once active and passive. In the report of 1854, Ravaisson applied his views in challenging the mechanical and geometric methods in the teaching of drawing that had come to prominence earlier in the century: the student should instead begin with direct, intuitive drawing of the embodiment of grace in the human figure, by copying models of classical works. Only thus can the student genuinely learn to draw. This method was to be facilitated by concentrating on parts of the body, principally the head, and by copying two-dimensional representations, even photographs of classical works. Ravaisson’s proposals were enacted, and in order to support them he began

Introduction 13

to prepare a volume offering, as he describes the project retrospectively in 1882, ‘a photographic collection of models reproducing first-order works of the most excellent masters, in their most favourable aspects and with the most favourable lighting’, which was to be distributed in all schools.54 Ravaisson’s Les classiques de l’art: modèles pour l’enseignement du dessin did not, however, appear for more than twenty years, which was all the more unfortunate in that in 1876, the year after its publication, under a Third Republic convinced that scientific and technical retardation had contributed directly to its humiliating defeat in 1870, Eugène Guillaume, Director-General of Fine-Arts within the Ministry of Public Instruction, had Ravaisson’s programme replaced, after acrimonious debate with him in committee meetings, by more utilitarian and less ‘elitist’ prescriptions.55 The teaching of drawing should – as Guillaume wrote in his own 1882 article on ‘The Teaching of Drawing’ that Buisson counter-posed to that of Ravaisson – be addressed to the masses, ‘where dreams of artistic vocations are the exception’,56 and tailored to the needs of workers, for whom habits of exactitude are crucial. Disconnected from the industrial realities of the modern world, Ravaisson’s method remained in a kind of empirical imprecision, when students required the discipline of technical drawing. Ravaisson retorted that geometry did not have a monopoly on exactitude, and that Pascal’s views about a greater, truer, intuitive exactitude should not be forgotten;57 that his method had its own utility, particularly in a nation such as France with strong manufacturing traditions in the arts of ornamentation and decoration; and that the state has a ‘duty not to refuse to ordinary schools an education designed to arouse the elite minds they might harbour’. Denying students the right to a liberal artistic education would doom the multitude to a slavish, technical ‘barbarism’, while only a ‘privileged class’ would gain taste and first-hand experience of the secret of beauty. In promoting thus the equality of opportunity and the access of all to a genuinely liberal education, Ravaisson attempted to influence the great wave of educational reform in the Third Republic. Certainly, Ravaisson’s proposal that ‘the man of the people, on whom material fatality bears with such a burden’ might ‘find the best alleviation of his harsh condition if his eyes were opened to what Leonardo da Vinci calls the bellezza del mondo’58 may appear breathtakingly incognizant of the real social and economic changes required in order to resolve la question ouvrière.59 There is, however, no need to deny that Ravaisson’s political stance is, in a word, patrician, or that his political evocations of the past – ancient Greece was ruled by gentleness just as the court at Versailles was governed by sympathy – are picturesque, to recognize that his proposals concerning artistic education are, in themselves, no more a form of ‘reactionary dreaming’, even though written over half a century later, than those of Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.60 The 1860s saw Ravaisson’s re-emergence on the contemporary philosophical scene. When the agrégation de philosophie was reinstated in 1863, after having been suppressed early in the Second Empire by Fortoul, it was Ravaisson’s turn to be

14

Félix Ravaisson

nominated – by the new minister Hector Duruy, an old Rollin classmate – as the President of its jury. This is a position of great influence, since the jury selects both the subject matter and the successful candidates in the examination. Ravaisson’s appointment must have been surprising: he was to preside over a university examination granting the right to dispense a curriculum that he had never taught.61 Yet Duruy soon provided Ravaisson with an opportunity to confirm his reputation as a philosopher by entrusting him with the writing of a report on the history of philosophy in France, part of a Ministry of Public Instruction series on the progress of the arts and the sciences, for the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Ravaisson immersed himself in the philosophical doctrines and scientific advances of the century, and then produced a long report-cum-manifesto outlining, in its concluding sections, a ‘spiritualist positivism’ or ‘spiritualist realism’ as the culmination of the philosophical tradition: a spiritualist positivism because Comte does not have a monopoly on ‘the positive’, and, in fact, offers only a shallow approach to it; a spiritualist realism because idealism, as Ravaisson understands it, succumbs to logical abstractions, as does materialism, and passes over the fundamental spiritual actuality constituting the essence of all things.62 The text, Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, concludes thus: If the genius of France has not changed, there will be nothing more natural for her than the triumph of the high doctrine, which teaches that matter is only the last degree and, so to speak, the shadow of existence, over systems that reduce everything to material elements and to a blind mechanism; which teaches that real existence, of which everything else is only an imperfect sketch, is that of spirit; that, in truth, to be is to live, and to live is to think and to will; that nothing occurs without persuasion; that the good and beauty alone explain the universe and its author; that the infinite and the absolute … consist in spiritual freedom; that freedom is thus the last word of things, and that, beneath the disorder and antagonisms which trouble the surface where phenomena occur, in the essential and eternal truth, everything is grace, love and harmony.63

Year after year students studied the Rapport in preparing for the agrégation and, as Bergson has noted, it effected a ‘profound change of orientation in university philosophy: Cousin’s influence gave way to that of Ravaisson’.64 Ravaisson attempted to give more concretion, as we will see, to this new spiritualism in his final philosophical essays, but the work of the philosophers he directly influenced and inspired – principally Jules Lachelier, Emile Boutroux, Bergson and Maurice Blondel – would show, as Henri Gouhier put it, ‘how far and correctly Ravaisson saw’.65 This new spiritualist orientation would prevail in French universities until at least the late 1920s, until Bergson in particular, as its most prominent representative, was subject to bitter and influential invective – by, most notably, Georges Politzer and Paul Nizan – for having mobilized his philosophy in the service of French nationalism during the First World War.66 Whether Ravaisson, had he been born two decades later,

Introduction 15

would have been able to resist the new, more nationalist philosophical ‘regiment’ led by Boutroux and Bergson in 1914 is a question as interesting as it is unanswerable.67 Ravaisson had made a re-entrance on the philosophical scene, but his concerns extended beyond philosophy in a narrow, disciplinary sense, and in June 1870 he was appointed by Napoleon III as Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Louvre. Even though he had had no formal archaeological training, events very soon offered him the opportunity to demonstrate his aptitude for the post, and introduced him to a subject, the Venus de Milo, that would occupy him, even obsess him, for the remainder of his life.68 Just two months after his appointment, Napoleon III was captured at Sedan by the Prussian army, which then marched towards Paris. In the Louvre, prized works of the great masters were hurriedly rolled up and sent to Brest, from where they could be shipped elsewhere, while the larger statues were merely stored in crates in a sandbagged hallway in order to offer them some protection against the Prussian artillery. Ravaisson, however, had the museum’s most prized statue, the Venus de Milo, packed in an oak crate and hidden behind two false walls in the basement of another building. In May of the following year, after the Siege of Paris and the French government’s capitulation, and then the tumult of the Paris Commune and the murderous reprisals that followed it, Ravaisson led a team back into the basement of the building, which had been seriously damaged by fire during the national government’s struggle to recapture the city. The crate had done its job, and, fortunately, a burst water pipe had protected it from the flames. Even more fortunately, for Ravaisson, the humidity in the basement had softened the plaster with which four broken pieces had been reattached to the Venus, two to the left hip and two to the right, and these newly detached pieces allowed study of the inside of the statue for the first time since it had arrived at the Louvre in 1821. Within a few weeks Ravaisson published the first of his essays on the Venus, essays which offer a combination of archaeological scruple and interpretative freedom that recalls his philological and philosophical approach in Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. First of all, Ravaisson proposed to right wrongs to which the Venus had been subject during clumsy attempts at restoration fifty years earlier. The statue is made of two halves that meet just below the hips, but Ravaisson discovered that for some reason the Louvre restorers had been unable to put the detached lower piece of the left side, which belonged to the lower half, into position so that it would be flush with the rest of the top of that half. The lower left side would thus collapse under the weight of the upper half when reunited with it, and so, after attempting to chisel off the protruding section of the lower half, the restorers decided to place two thin wooden wedges – like elongated doorstops – between the two halves, with the wedges inclining down towards the front of the statue, and with one wedge marginally lower than the other, so as to make the small gap visible from the front between the two halves as small as possible across its whole length. This restoration had the effect of inclining the statue ‘from the left to the right and from the back to

16

Félix Ravaisson

the front more than it was supposed to’, which entailed ‘that it did not quite have the proportions or movement that it had before’.69 This was exacerbated by changes to the base of the statue: the old broken base, which Ravaisson shows was not supposed to be level, had been made level when fitted inside a new base, which meant that the line where the two halves of the statue met was now at least six degrees off the horizontal. Ravaisson’s proposals to rectify the pose of the statue – which would, he argued, return more grace and gentleness to it – were vetoed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was reluctant to disturb ingrained viewing habits. In 1883, however, when repairs to the Greek and Roman galleries of the Louvre meant that the Venus was put into storage, Ravaisson took the opportunity to have the wedges removed. In 1892, he published a second version of his essay (the most philosophical, third section of which appears as Chapter 6 of the present volume) to justify his decision and to defend his interpretation of the statue. This interpretation takes up the suggestion of the historian of art and architecture Antoine Crysostome Quatremère de Quincy: the relative negligence in the carving on the left side of the statue indicates that she was supposed to be viewed from her right, that another figure must have stood on her left, and thus that the Venus may well have belonged to a Greek original of Roman monuments showing her appeasing Mars.70 The Venus had, he suggested, her left arm on the shoulder of Mars, while her right was touching his arm, thus imploring him to stay with her rather than go to war. The composition would thus represent Venus’s victory, without force, over force. Ravaisson essentially concurred, but supposing the Mars to be of a similar form to the Ares Borghese, also in the Louvre, he spent many years trying to determine the original position of the arms of the Venus in relation to this Mars, and even took up sculpture in order to do so. Although he urged that no restoration should ever be imposed on the Venus, his reconstruction of the ensemble can be seen at the end of Chapter 6. According to this reconstruction, the arm resting on the Mars’s shoulder was, pace Quatremère de Quincy, the fragment of lower arm and hand carrying an apple that had been found in Melos along with the Venus. For Ravaisson, it is not necessary to reject these fragments in order to block the hypothesis according to which the Venus was carrying the apple of discord after winning the talent show on Mount Ida that was the Judgement of Paris, for, loosely held in the hand as a symbol rather than displayed overtly as a prize, the apple signifies ‘felicity and fecundity’ instead of the frivolous ‘triumph of a puerile vanity’. Aside from the fact that no fragment of the Mars was ever found at the site on Melos, two major objections stand in the way of Quatremère’s and Ravaisson’s interpretation. The first concerns the base of the statue, which is broken on one side, a break with which, in 1821, the base of one of the herms also found with the Venus fitted well. Now, if the base of the herm originally belonged with the Venus, it could not have formed an ensemble with a Mars, for there would have been no place for it to stand. The base of the herm carried the inscription ‘… xandros son of Menides

Introduction 17

citizen of Antioch of Meander made the statue’, which was troubling, since Antioch was not founded until 270 bc and the statue was supposed – by curators keen to make up for the return of the Apollo Belvedere to Rome after Napoleon’s defeat, and to rival Elgin’s appropriation of the Parthenon Marbles – to be a masterpiece from the classical age of Greece. A drawing of the base of the herm is all we now have, for it was removed and ‘lost’, but Ravaisson adopts the view that led to its removal, namely that its attachment to the base of the Venus was the work of rudimentary restoration, which would explain why the first letters of the name of the artist are missing. Ravaisson’s dating of the statue does not rely on his arguments to this effect, since, by 1892 at least, he concedes that rather than an original, classical work, the Venus is a later reproduction of a work from the classical period, but his interpretation of the original composition certainly does. A second objection, which Quatremère had already met, is that Mars was little worshipped in classical Greece, and apparently not in his association with Venus, the story of which was recounted by Homer merely as an adulterous affair. Ravaisson responds by pointing out classical monuments featuring Venus and Mars together, and by disputing the veracity of the poetic narrative in relation to ordinary and early Greek beliefs: the union of the two divinities, he claims, was essential to popular Greek religious and moral ideas – ideas to which the poets were often, as in this case, unfaithful – as a symbol of conjugal felicity. Certainly, Venus came to be worshipped in many places as hetaera, i.e. as a courtesan, and came to be worshipped by courtesans in particular; but, Ravaisson notes, hetaera originally means ‘friend’, and only later, as in Plato’s Symposium, does ‘earthly’ Venus Pandemos (Venus for ‘all the people’), now with specially lascivious significance, emerge from Venus Urania. Ravaisson’s ultimate motivations become apparent, however, with his further argument that what is named the Ares Borghese is, in fact, a figure of the hero Theseus, a mythological human and not a divinity, who established the cult of Venus Urania when founding Athens. The composition of Venus appeasing Theseus would thus offer the ‘expressive image of a divine grace seeking out humanity in order to unify itself with it; a conception that was not foreign to Judaism, in which Jehovah goes to the front of the chosen people to bring them closer to him, and that the Christian religion was to carry, after paganism and Judaism, to a new height’. The composition would represent the generosity of a divine principle that lowers itself to humanity in order to raise humanity back up to its level; it would show, as Ravaisson will put it, the divine as a principle of ‘condescendence’. This is what Ravaisson attempts to capture in the Venus de Milo, and on this point Bergson says it all: ‘People smiled to see him model and remodel the arms of the goddess. Did they know that what Ravaisson was really trying to recapture in the rebellious clay was the very soul of Greece?’71 In having the wedges between the two halves of the statue removed, and in protecting it from any restoration, Ravaisson played a crucial role in the curation

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and conservation of the Venus de Milo. Later, however, more single-mindedly scientific archaeologists such as Solomon Reinach and Adolf Furtwängler, who locked horns over the Venus, agreed about at least one thing, namely that Ravaisson’s ‘inductions’ – which include the conjecture that the statue is modelled on the Venus of the Gardens, known only through textual sources, by Phidias or his school – were ill-founded.72 The philosophical interpretation of Greek existence underlying Ravaisson’s interpretation of the Venus, however, also leads him to similarly controversial archaeological claims concerning (to cite the title of Chapter 7 of the present volume) ‘Greek Funerary Monuments’. In 1873, a marble funerary lekythos – a tall vessel normally used for storing oil – bearing the name Myrrhine above a bas-relief showing her being led by Hermes to, presumably, the underworld and towards figures representing her family, was found in Athens, and a mould of it sent to the Louvre. Given the position of her family, and that a member of it, ‘an old man, perhaps her father, raises his right hand in a gesture or joy and admiration’, and also that ‘Myrrhine inclines her head with a gracious gentleness and smiles’,73 the scene resists interpretation as one of separation or departure. Ravaisson takes this newly discovered monument, dated to 420–410 bc, to offer the interpretative key to ‘departure scenes’ in Greek funerary art in general: these scenes should instead be named ‘reunion scenes’, and, more precisely, ‘reunion scenes in Elysium’,74 for they present – with varying degrees of potentially misleading simplification, and according to an equally misleading all too ‘material’ conception of the future life barely distinguishing it from this one – gracious greetings in another world. If we recognize, Ravaisson argues, that the classical Greeks, from the beginning, and like the peoples with which they were in relation, did indeed have a conception of a future life, we will be more able to recognize joyful, Elysian greetings in these scenes. Ravaisson believes that he can announce ‘without any temerity that soon the views I had to combat will have hardly any adherents’, but contemporary scholarship tends to explain the scenes as representations of our material, human world, even when it is indeed a reunion scene that is represented. In the words of Alain Pasquier, a classical art historian who has occupied Ravaisson’s position at the Louvre, it approaches the question with more ‘prudence’, considers that there was probably an ‘evolution in the spirit of funerary bas-reliefs’, and is reluctant to reduce the interpretation of these scenes to a single ‘key’.75 Ravaisson’s proposals are not without merit, but his philosophical commitments do not allow him to pay sufficient attention to an essential ambiguity in some of these scenes, an ambiguity also expressed in the Greek salutation chaire, used on both arrival and departure. ‘Mysteries’ (Chapter 8 of this volume) offers a study of Greek religion, whose necessity Ravaisson had already announced in the second volume of his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote,76 and presents more deliberately his view that ‘the system of ideas and practices that constituted the basis of both dogma and worship in paganism, in Judaism and then in Christianity, and then everywhere else, is

Introduction 19

something universal and eternal’. The Eleusinian mysteries, he argues, were ‘a great concert of admiration and recognition’, whose ultimate purpose was to achieve a ‘union, whose image was conjugal partnership, with eternal beauty’; and the ‘supreme realization’ of these ideas is later ‘announced by Christianity in the coming reign of pure Spirit’. This approach could easily be taken to express an unremarkable Christian apologetics, yet Ravaisson’s Christianity is hardly orthodox: the ‘Gospels allow us to glimpse through certain veils, but to glimpse nevertheless, an intimate union with the divine essence as the consummation of religion, and it is in this that a dream of both paganism and Judaism, opposed in so many other respects, will be realized’. The Gospels, therefore, are still the inchoate expression of a spiritual truth towards which paganism and Judaism already yearned, a truth which will be realized, Ravaisson suggests here, only in the Middle Ages. Moreover, if the Christian message is new, Jesus Christ is the ‘new Prometheus and the new Orpheus’, as Ravaisson will write in ‘Philosophical Testament’, and he is ‘in agreement with Hellenism’.77 Ravaisson’s views on the continuities or discontinuities between the Greek and Christian worlds depend on whether he writes of Greek art and religion or its philosophy: Venus may well reappear in Christianity, but the pinnacle of Greek philosophy, as he writes in a fragment of the unfinished third volume of his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, ‘remained, amidst a religious world and the doctrine of nature, as a promise that could not be realised. It is in another world, and in another doctrine that it would gain its realisation, in the world and the doctrine of Spirit’.78 Aristotle’s idea of a lofty, immovable divinity had to be developed, within another horizon, in terms of a divine principle of love, self-abandon and ‘condescendence’. Ravaisson had not, then, come to focus on erudite researches in archaeology and the history of religions at the expense of his philosophical work. On the contrary, the thematic unity underlying Ravaisson’s diverse professional and intellectual activities as archivist, historian, pedagogue, curator and philosopher is as remarkable as the continuity in the development of his thinking as a whole. It is not necessary to delve too deeply below the surface to divine the serpeggiamento uniting Ravaisson’s work.79 It is through the ‘philosophical paleontology’80 in his archaeological researches that Ravaisson pursues his original Aristotle project, and that he is led to develop a philosophy of revelation – which is clearly indebted to Schelling’s philosophy of revelation that Ravaisson had studied closely81 – in his later essays. The first of these essays is the 1887 ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’ (Chapter 9 of this volume). Pascal, Ravaisson proclaims, is a philosopher, and not merely an amalgam of scientist and Christian apologist, who provides, if not a complete system, then at least the ‘principles of a veritable philosophy’ that allows for its harmonization and unification with Christianity. The most fundamental of these philosophical principles is the distinction that Ravaisson had already invoked in his reflection on drawing, namely that between l’esprit de géometrie and l’esprit de finesse, translated here as ‘geometric mind’ and ‘intuitive mind’. Pascal shows that ‘the sciences

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generally depend on nothing other than geometric mind, whereas the arts … depend on intuitive mind; that to deal geometrically with art and morality, in the same way as the sciences, is to pervert them; that intuitive mind is, in opposition to reasoning or deductive mind, a faculty of immediate appreciation to which the name of judgement is particularly fitting’. This is not to say that Pascal adequately reflected on art and aesthetic experience, for ‘if he had, he would have noticed that one of its essential characteristics is the infinite capacity to undulate in every direction without effort, and to be shaped in myriad ways by the folds and unfolds offered by the sinuosity of living things (serpeggiamento)’. On this lack, Ravaisson is acutely critical elsewhere: Pascal ‘dives into an abyss without having aesthetics for a guide. He lacked Music and Painting. Orpheus, Leonardo, Correggio, Mozart; he remains a Jansenist, an iconoclast holding grace, women and children in contempt.’82 Nevertheless, the metaphysical secret that Pascal cannot grasp aesthetically, he grasps religiously. His development of the idea of intuitive mind in terms of ‘the heart’, the organ of knowledge of ‘first principles’, departs from the voluntarism conditioning Descartes’s philosophy, according to which the understanding is subordinate to the will. The heart teaches us first principles, but it also leads us to the First Principle: ‘what is in itself this centre to which the heart teaches us to relate everything, this extremity towards which everything that belongs to intuitive mind, to feeling, to judgement tends, whether it is near or far? A higher will with which it is our destiny to be reunited.’ Pascal’s doctrine of the heart, Ravaisson argues, allows for a continuity between metaphysical knowledge and revelation – they approach each other, Ravaisson now holds, ‘by degrees to the point where they come at least to unite and interpenetrate’83 – and leads to the summit of the Christian spiritual and ethical ideal, namely charity and self-renunciation. In 1893 the Revue de métaphysique et de morale was founded by a group of young philosophers – Xavier Léon, Daniel Halévy and Léon Brunschvicg – with the aim of defending ‘philosophy properly speaking’ against scientism and Comte’s Positivism, together with the forms of mysticism that had risen as a reaction to them.84 For the inaugural issue, the eighty-year-old Ravaisson was chosen to contribute the lead article, which he entitled ‘Metaphysics and Morals’, and which offers, once again, something of a manifesto for a philosophical movement, but one that is now active in ‘many minds’, and no longer merely a possibility. After characterizing Comte’s Positivism – and also, much more questionably, Kant’s Criticism, which Ravaisson takes to result in little more than scepticism85 – as ‘insufficient for the demands of the understanding’ as well as for the ‘demands of the heart’, Ravaisson sketches an anti-Positivist philosophy of history: rather than religion giving way to metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn to positive science, ‘the instinctive perceptions of the early period (as Vico had said) return to be confirmed by the meditations of the most profound thinkers’. Philosophy, in other words, grasps genuine positivity not by eliminating religion and metaphysics, but by synthesizing them. The account of

Introduction 21

the history of philosophy that subtends this philosophy of history also consists of three essential moments: Aristotle grasps, beneath Platonic idealizing abstractions, the positivity or actuality of being; Descartes shows how this principle of activity and actuality is to be grasped in the mind itself, ultimately as will; Pascal leads us to grasp, beneath the will, the heart. This history of modern philosophy is strictly franco-français,86 but, for Ravaisson, in the heart is revealed the highest being, not simply as the pure actuality of thought, but as a principle of ‘condescending’, loving creativity: ‘[i]n everything, first of all the perfect, the absolute, the good, that which owes its being only to itself; next there is what results from its generous condescendence, and which, by virtue of what the absolute has left behind gradually climbs back up to it.’ This is not simply a Plotinian idea of divine emanation, and if it can be described as a form of kenosis, it is necessary to distinguish, following Denise Leduc-Fayette, an ontological from a historical kenosis in Ravaisson’s onto-theology, even though the two are inseparable:87 things are given by a principle that ‘gives to the point of offering itself up’, but such a gift allows for a return of the created, in time – through nature, humanity, history and divine condescendence – to the primal source. As ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’ puts it: Humanity having fallen, because it has detached itself from its own principle, it is necessary, in order to raise it up, that this principle itself descend into it; it is necessary that the principle lower itself into this region where humanity has let itself fall, that it make itself a mediator, so to speak, and that it bring humanity back, reborn, to the extremity of perfection for which it was made. This is what is called incarnation and redemption.

When Ravaisson died in 1900, he left notes for a substantial work on his desk. Xavier Léon collated and published them as ‘Testament Philosophique’ – this was the title that Ravaisson gave the work in conversation during the last years of his life – in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1901, and a second, expanded edition (translated as the final chapter of the present volume) was produced by Charles Devivaise in 1933. This ‘Philosophical Testament’ presents Ravaisson’s attempt to draw together a metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics as a philosophy of love. Although it is constituted from fragments, the ‘organic architecture’88 of Ravaisson’s thinking in the intertwining of its three key themes, or streams, is evident. The metaphysics opposes the ‘nihilism’ of those who ‘finding no force and no greatness within themselves, see also outside of them only weakness and smallness’, and ‘have no difficulty admitting that everything was formed from nothing’. Everything, on the contrary, begins from a principle of liberality, and the organic world is witness to this: the living being tends towards its goal, as even Claude Bernard had recognized after attempting to reduce life to the laws of physics and chemistry, but this is not a drive towards a conceptual aim. Instead, it is a kind of ‘thought without reflection’, an instinct, desire or tendency that, as Ravaisson had shown over half a century earlier,

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is instantiated in our habits. This approach serves to account for the development of particular beings, certainly, but also for the ‘successive production of different species’. In evolution, ‘[t]he creative principle, with the lines through which it is embodied, spreads out, like a spring that pours out into every part of the whole, and transforms itself there so as to be reborn even more worthy of admiration and love’. Living nature – an élan vital, as Bergson will say – advances not by a process of synthesis or association, but by dissociation, and in the process of spiritual ‘creative ascent’, ‘nature … would be the history of the soul, a history continued and realized by humanity and its art’. It is, however, the loving principle of creativity in nature that is the principal object of creativity in art. More than simply the beauty or even the grace in its model, art can divine love: ‘a beautiful model … is one where the whole and the parts seem permeated by a reciprocal love, and is all the more beautiful as their union appears more spontaneous.’ This, Ravaisson claims, is what ‘Schelling must have wanted to explain when he said that beautiful things are those … in which everything seems to love’. Harmony in the work of art, in other words, is an expression of a secret, metaphysical principle of love, and it is the same principle, Ravaisson argues, that should regulate ethics and morality as the art of life. This is not just a matter of loving thy neighbour as thyself, but rather of generosity and heroic love ‘to the point of an entire immolation of the self ’. Ravaisson’s ultimate aim is to make minds more ‘penetrable by and to each other, open also to each other, quite the opposite to the separatism of the present time’, but this is not by providing a ‘new theory for the understanding’, but rather by convincing and changing our sensibility with ‘the contagious force of reality and life’. * For philosophers at least, it is regrettable that Ravaisson, occupied by other interests and duties, did not complete his Testament, and that his spiritualist manifestos did not, after his philosophical renaissance in the 1860s, lead to more concerted works in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. It is undeniable that even the sense of ‘spirit’ in the work of this ‘spiritualist’ philosopher remains in many respects indeterminate, for us to determine, and that Ravaisson could have addressed more directly the fundamental tensions in his philosophy of spirit as actuality and, at the same time, as ‘something’ actual. In the end, it was more of an impulse than a doctrine that he transmitted to later French philosophy – an impulse manifest not only in Bergson’s Creative Evolution and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,89 but also in the work of later phenomenologists such as Paul Ricoeur, whose Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary90 returns to ‘Of Habit’, and Maurice MerleauPonty, who addresses the idea of the ‘serpentine line’ in Eye and Mind.91 Even on the other side of the Rhine, this impulse did not pass unnoticed, since Ravaisson’s significance was highlighted by Martin Heidegger, who must have seen in him a philosopher revitalizing the question of being, a philosopher whose spiritualist

Introduction 23

reading of the Metaphysics, according to which being as spirit is the highest being, brings to the fore the problem of the ‘onto-theological constitution of metaphysics’.92 This selection of Ravaisson’s essays contains all of his shorter works in philosophy with the exception of his secondary doctoral thesis on Speusippus. That this Latin text was translated for the first time into French only in 2012 speaks, indeed, of its secondary status; that it is not included in the present volume also speaks of my linguistic abilities. The late Dominique Janicaud’s collection of Ravaisson’s work on art and religion – L’Art et les mystères grecs (Paris: L’Herne, 1985) – partially guided the present selection, but I added to it the key 1882 dictionary entry ‘On the Teaching of Drawing’, and omitted ‘Le monument de Myrrhine’, since it covers the same ground as ‘Greek Funerary Monuments’. A full bibliography of Ravaisson’s published work, which comprises over eighty items, can be found at the end of Joseph Dopp’s Félix Ravaisson: la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1933). It was not possible to present a critical edition of the essays selected, since the apparatus required could not be contained with the essays in a single volume. Besides, it would be odd to attempt such a project in English when no such edition yet exists in French. The translators have, however, occasionally supplied translations of the passages of Greek and Latin in the body of the text that are unaccompanied by an interpretative paraphrase. Either in the body of the text or in footnotes, these translations of Greek and Latin appear in square brackets. Occasional explanatory notes on the part of the translators are also presented in square brackets, and when they derive from the work of Janicaud, they are preceded by his name. The translations have been standardized across the volume, but it should be noted that in this volume of French ‘spiritualism’ there is no consistent rendition of l’âme or l’esprit – these are rendered variably as soul, spirit or mind depending on the context and even the mood of the translator. My thanks are due to Frank Chouraqui, Tullio Viola, Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Jeremy Dunham, Christophe Perrin, Christophe Satoor, Eugenio Mozzarelli, Christopher Paone and Kevin Temple for their generous and insightful comments on a first draft of this introduction. I am also indebted to John Sellars for his patient advice concerning Ravaisson’s classical scholarship in ‘Essay on Stoicism’; to my departmental colleague Jason Crowley for advice on Greek funerary ‘departure scenes’; to Matthew Barnard and Caroline Baylis-Green for occasional lexical inspiration; and to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for accepting my proposal for the volume and for their care in its production. M. W. S.

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Notes Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), p. 99/ Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 75. 2. See, for example, Arthur Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: the Conception of “Real Duration”’, Mind XXII (1913): 465–83; L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914); and J. Alexander Gunn, Modern French Philosophy: A Study of the Development since Comte (London: Fisher & Unwin, 1922). Two illuminating studies of the work of Pierre Maine de Biran stand out amidst the general obscurity of nineteenth-century French philosophy within the Anglophone world during the second half of the twentieth century: Philip P. Hallie, Maine de Biran: Reformer of Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) and F. C. T. Moore, The Psychology of Maine de Biran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 3. Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. and ed. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair, preface by Cathérine Malabou (London: Continuum, 2008). 4. On Ravaisson’s painting and drawing, see Tullio Viola’s ‘The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson: Art, Drawing, Scholarship and Philosophy’, in Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung, ed. U. Feist and M. Rath (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), pp. 155–74. Viola’s short intellectual biography of Ravaisson should be read alongside this one, and I am indebted to it on many points. 5. There is a tendency in English-language accounts to confuse Ravaisson’s uncle Gaspard-Théodore Mollien with Nicolas-François Mollien, Napoleon’s Treasurer, and thus to elevate unduly the young Ravaisson’s social standing. For clarity on this point, see the best source on Ravaisson’s life, namely Louis Léger’s 1901 discourse on his predecessor at the Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles-Lettres: ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Ravaisson-Mollien’ in Comptes rendus des séances de Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles-Lettres 45 (1901): 327–72. Available at: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/crai_00650536_1901_num_45_3_16840. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 6. Théodore Jouffroy, as cited by Pierre Macherey, ‘Les débuts philosophiques de Victor Cousin’, Corpus 18 (1991): Victor Cousin, ed. P. Vermeren, pp. 29–49, p. 31. 7. See Joseph Ferrari, Les philosophes salariés (Paris: Payot, 1983 [1849]). 8. For this analogy, see Patrice Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, Les Études philosophiques 1993/1, pp. 65–86, and the whole of his Victor Cousin: le jeu de la philosophie et de l’état (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). 9. C. L. Michelet, Examen critique de l’ouvrage d’Aristote intitulé Métaphysique (Paris, 1836; reprinted with a preface by J.-F. Courtine [Paris: Vrin, 1982]). 10. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, vol. I (Paris, 1837), p. 11. Most of the original editions of Ravaisson’s work, including the reports for the Ministry of 1.

Introduction 25

Public Instruction, are available on Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/), but it would be ungainly to provide the particular electronic addresses each time. 11. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 5. 12. On these sources, see Joseph Dopp, Félix Ravaisson: la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1933), pp. 72–80. See also Denis Thouard (ed.), Aristote au XIXème siècle (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004). 13. Jean Baruzi, ‘Introduction’ in Félix Ravaisson, De l’habitude (Paris: Alcan, 1933), p. 1. For three of the more recent studies of the question, see J.-F. Courtine, ‘Les relations de Ravaisson et de Schelling’, in Jean Quillien (ed.), La réception de la philosophie allemande en France au xixe et au xxe siècles (Lille: Presses du Septentrion, 1994), pp. 111–34; C. Mauve, ‘Ravaisson, lecteur et interprète de Schelling’, Romantisme 25 (1995): 65–74; and Gaëll Guibert, Félix Ravaisson: d’une philosophie première à la philosophie de la révélation de Schelling (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). 14. See Dopp, pp. 127–8, who presents a Ravaisson very strongly influenced by Schelling. 15. Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, trans. with a preface by F. Ravaisson, Nouvelle Revue germanique (October 1835): 65. 16. See Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, p. 69. 17. Charles Devivaise published some of Ravaisson’s work towards the third volume as Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote: Fragments du Tome III (Paris: Vrin, 1953). 18. Pierre Aubenque, ‘Ravaisson interprète d’Aristote’, Les Études philosophiques 1984/4, pp. 435–50, p. 437. 19. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 419. 20. Aubenque, ‘Ravaisson interprète d’Aristote’, p. 438. 21. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 420. 22. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 421. 23. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 422. 24. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 482. See Aubenque, ‘Ravaisson interprète d’Aristote’, pp. 443–4 on this originally Schellingian odyssey. 25. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 548. 26. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote II (Paris, 1846), p. 24. 27. See Ravaisson’s October 1842 letter to Hector Poret: Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p. 298. 28. Ravaisson, Speusippi De Primis Rerum Principiis Placita Qualia Fusse Videantur ex Aristotele (Paris: 1838). On this secondary thesis and its relation to Ravaisson’s work on Aristotle, see Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, pp. 221–4, and Alain Petit, ‘Le symptôme Speusippe : le spectre de l’émanatisme dans la pensée métaphysique de Ravaisson’, Cahiers Philosophiques 129/2 (2012): 57–65. 29. Cited in Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, p. 71. 30. For these remarks on habit as ‘desire’, see, in particular, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote I, p. 450. 31. Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p. 292.

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32. For a reading of Ravaisson’s appropriation of Leibniz’s thinking in Of Habit as involving a return to a form of monadological metaphysics, see Jeremy Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2015. 1078775. 33. In this connection, see Jean Cazeneuve, Ravaisson et la philosophie médicale (Paris: PUF, 1958). 34. See Pierre Maine de Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, vol.1 of Œuvres de Maine de Biran, ed. F. Azouvi (Paris: J. Vrin, 1987), and M. D. Boehm’s translation of the 1802 dissertation as The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking (Williams and Wilkins, 1929; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970). This translation does not, however, contain some of the important notes offering conjectures on the causes of motor habit that Biran added to his prize-winning dissertation just before its publication. 35. On these points, see my ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 49/1 (2011): 65–85. 36. On this point, see Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1997) and my ‘Is Habit the “Fossilised Residue of a Spiritual Activity”? Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42/1 (2011): 33–52, which also examines the question of whether Ravaisson is necessarily committed to the thesis that all acquisition of habit begins in reflective thought. 37. Jacques Billard, ‘Introduction’, in De l’habitude: Métaphysique et morale, pp. 1–103, p. 14. 38. Mme Poret, wife of the philosopher Hector Poret discussed below, wrote to her husband in 1837: ‘Your Cousin is the greatest acrobat I’ve ever known. Poor Ravaisson has now also become one of his victims. Fortunately, he already knew him well-enough so as not to be surprised by his caprices’; cited in Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, p. 85. 39. For analysis of Biran’s response to Hume, see Philip P. Hallie, Maine de Biran: Reformer of Empiricism, pp. 84–104, and my ‘Is There a ‘Dispositional Modality’? Maine de Biran and Ravaisson on Agency and Inclination’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 32/2 (2015): 161–79. 40. See Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, p. 75. 41. On this issue, see Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénémonologie du corps: essai sur l’ontologie biranienne (Paris: PUF, 1965) and my ‘Embodiment: Conceptions of the Lived Body from Maine to Biran to Bergson’ in The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy, Vol. 4: The 19th Century, ed. A. Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 187–203. 42. Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, pp. 138–9. 43. See Ives Radrizzani, ‘Maine de Biran: Un Fichte Français?’ in Fichte et la France, Vol. 1, ed. I. Radrizzani (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997), pp. 107–40. 44. In this connection, see Simone Goyard-Fabre, ‘Ravaisson et les historiens du XIXème siècle’, Les Études Philosophiques (1984/4): 481–96.

Introduction 27

45. Ravaisson, Rapports au ministre de l’instruction publique sur les bibliothèques de l’ouest, suivis de pieces inédites (Paris, 1841). 46. For discussion of the significance of these texts for Ravaisson, see Dopp, pp. 280–4, and for more philological detail concerning the Eriugena discovery, see Tullio Viola, ‘The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson’, p. 163, n.26. Ravaisson made other significant discoveries in medieval philosophy, including texts by William of Champeaux and Abelard, in his later reports of 1846, 1855 and 1862; see Viola, p. 163. 47. In a letter to Hector Poret of October 1842, Ravaisson wrote: ‘I realised that my views seemed, rightly or wrongly, to have a mystical air, hardly made to please an assembly where political scientists and economists predominated’; see Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p. 294. 48. John Sellars, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Handbook to the Stoic Tradition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 7. 49. See Katerina Ierodiakonou, ‘Introduction’, in Topics in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–22, p. 4. 50. For reasons of economy, I follow Dominique Janicaud in L’Art et les mystères grecs (Paris: L’Herne, 1985) in producing just this first section of the report, but I alter his title ‘L’Art et le dessin d’après Léonard da Vinci’. 51. ‘L’enseignement du dessin d’après M. F. Ravaisson’ within the entry ‘Dessin’ of F. Buisson (ed.), Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1882), pp. 671–84. Ravaisson wrote two other entries in the dictionary that it was not possible to reproduce here: ‘Art’, Vol. I, pp. 122–4, and another on the practical aspects of drawing in Vol. II (Paris: Hachette, 1882), pp. 575–80. 52. Henri Bergson, ‘La vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’ in Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959), pp. 1450–81, p. 1461; ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’ in The Creative Mind, trans. M. Andison (New York: 1946), pp. 220–52, p. 231. 53. Gabriel Séailles, Le génie dans l’art (Paris: 1883). 54. See Ravaisson, Les classiques de l’art: modèles pour l’enseignement du dessin (Paris: Rapilly, 1875), and, for more detail on the project, Mouna Mekouar, ‘Étudier ou rêver l’antique. Félix Ravaisson et la reproduction de la statuaire antique’, Images Re-vues, 1|2005, document 6; URL: http://imagesrevues.revues.org/222. 55. For a full account of Ravaisson’s controversy with Guillaume, see Canales, ‘Movement before Cinematography: The High Speed Qualities of Sentiment’, Journal of Visual Culture 5/3 (2006): 275–94. 56. Eugène Guillaume ‘L’enseignement du dessin’ in Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, pp. 684–9, p. 689. 57. On this point, see Canales, ‘Movement before Cinematography’, p. 284. 58. Ravaisson, ‘Art’, Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire I, p. 123; Bergson will repeat this proposal in an even less tenable fashion by prescribing not the beauty but the novelty in the world. See the concluding paragraph of the late essay ‘Le possible et le réel’ in La pensée et le mouvant in Œuvres; ‘The Possible and the Real’ in The Creative Mind, pp. 91–106.

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59. A question to which Ravaisson returns in his 1887 essay ‘Education’: Revue politique et littéraire. Revue bleue 17 (23 April 1887), pp. 513–9. 60. See Goyard-Fabre, ‘Ravaisson et les historiens’, p. 494 for the claim that Ravaisson is a reactionary dreamer. 61. As Leroy notes: ‘Notice sur M. Ravaisson-Mollien’, p. 357. 62. Ravaisson, Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1984), p. 243. 63. Ravaisson, Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, p. 320. 64. Bergson, ‘La vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’, p. 1472; ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, p. 244. 65. Henri Gouhier, ‘Introduction’, in Maine de Biran, Œuvres choisies (Paris: Aubier, 1942), p. 22. 66. On the pivotal nature of Politzer’s critique, in particular, for the course of twentieth-century French philosophy, see Frédéric Worms, La philosophie en France au XXème siècle: Moments (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 194–9; and Giuseppi Bianco, Après Bergson (Paris: PUF, 2015). 67. Ravaisson’s philosophy of love would not have been much use for the French war effort in 1914. Bergson’s philosophy of will before the war, in contrast, was well suited to it, as I argue in ‘Bergson’s Philosophy of Will and the War of 1914–18’, forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas. 68. For a full account of this story, see Gregory Curtis, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003). 69. Ravaisson, Venus de Milo (Paris: Hachette, 1871), p. 12. 70. On Quatremère de Quincy’s interpretation, see Curtis, Disarmed, pp. 77–83. 71. Bergson, ‘La vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’, in Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959), p. 1477/‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, p. 247. 72. In this connection, see Curtis, Disarmed, Ch. 5, and Reinach’s brief notice on Ravaisson’s archaeological work in Revue archéologique 1900/I, p. 460. 73. Ravaisson, Le monument de Myrrhine (Paris: 1876), p. 2. This essay is reproduced in Ravaisson, L’Art et les mystères grecs, pp. 207–38. 74. Ravaisson, Le monument de Myrrhine, p. 3. 75. See Dominique Janicaud, ‘Entretien avec Alain Pasquier’ in Ravaisson, L’Art et les mystères grecs, pp. 241–6, p. 243. 76. See Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, II, p. 350. 77. The final citation is from a fragment published by Dominique Janicaud in Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p. 262. 78. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote: Fragments du Tome III (Héllenisme-Judaisme-Christianisme), ed. Devivaise, p. 54. 79. See, again, Viola, ‘The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson’. 80. Ravaisson, ‘Discours pour la séance publique annuelle de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques’ (5 December 1896). 81. See J.-F. Courtine, ‘Les relations de Ravaisson et de Schelling’. 82. Ravaisson, fragment in Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p. 237. See also Claire Marin, ‘Introduction’ in Ravaisson, La philosophie de Pascal (Paris: Sandre, 2007).

Introduction 29

83. Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote: Fragments du Tome III, p. 38. 84. See Stephan Soulié, ‘La Belle époque de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale: horizon académique et tentation du politique (1891–1914)’, Le Temps des médias 2008/2 (n° 11): 198–210. 85. On Ravaisson’s reading of Kant as sceptic, see Andreas Bellantone, ‘Ravaisson: Le Champ Abandonné de la Métaphysique’, Cahiers philosophiques 129/2, pp. 5–21. It should not be forgotten, however, that ‘Of Habit’ (Part II, Section I) – in a rather difficult manner – attempts to incorporate the findings of Kant’s ‘transcendental aesthetic’. 86. Should we ‘perhaps add Leibniz, with his monadology’ to this list, as Bellantone suggests (‘Ravaisson: Le Champ Abandonné de la Métaphysique’, p. 19)? Ravaisson states why he did not, despite all that he borrows from Leibniz, in the very same essay: ‘It is perhaps due to not having as profound an awareness of what is special and superior in the order of thought that Leibniz attempted, vainly, to replace with his pre-established harmony between the body and the mind their real union, and to explain the free decisions of the will by a preponderance of motives which transports to the spiritual sphere a mechanism of the corporeal world that is itself more apparent than real.’ 87. Denise Leduc-Fayette, ‘La Métaphysique de Ravaisson et le Christ’ in Les Études philosophiques 1984/4, pp. 511–27. 88. Claire Marin, ‘Introduction’, in Ravaisson, Testament Philosophique (Paris: Allia, 2008), p. 7. 89. L’Evolution créatrice and Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959); Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 1977). 90. Paul Ricoeur, Le Volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950); Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. E. Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 91. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. G. A. Johnson, trans. M. B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern, 1993), pp. 121–50. 92. See, in this connection, Daniel Panis, ‘Le mot “être” dans “De l’habitude”’, Les Études philosophiques 1993/1, pp. 61–4.

30

1 Of Habit 3Wsper ga_r fu&sij h@dh to_ e!qoj Aristotle, De Mem.

I Habit, in the widest sense, is a general and permanent way of being, the state of an existence considered either as the unity of its elements or as the succession of its different phases. An acquired habit is the consequence of a change. But what we especially intend by the word ‘habit’, which is the subject of this study, is not simply acquired habit, but habit that is contracted, owing to a change, with respect to the very change that gave birth to it. Now, once acquired, habit is a general, permanent way of being, and if change is transitory, habit subsists beyond the change that brought it about. Moreover, if it is related, insofar as it is habit and by its very essence, only to the change that engendered it, then habit remains for a change which either is no longer or is not yet; it remains for a possible change. This is its defining characteristic. Habit is not, therefore, merely a state, but a disposition, a virtue. With the exception of change that brings something from nothing into existence or from existence to nothingness, all change is realized in time; and what brings a habit into being is not simply change understood as modifying the thing, but change understood as occurring in time. Habit has all the more force when the modification that produced it is further prolonged or repeated. Habit is thus a disposition relative to change, which is engendered in a being by the continuity or the repetition of this very same change. Nothing, then, is capable of habit that is not capable of change; but everything capable of change is not by that fact alone capable of habit. A body changes place; but if we throw a body 100 times in the same direction, with the same speed, it still does not contract a habit; it still remains the same as it was with regard to the movement that has been imparted to it 100 times.1 Habit implies more than mere mutability;

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it does not simply imply mutability in something that remains without changing; it supposes a change in the disposition, in the potential, in the internal virtue of that in which the change occurs, which itself does not change. I. The universal law, the fundamental character of a being, is the tendency to persist in its way of being. The conditions under which being is represented to us in the world are Space and Time. Space is the condition and the most apparent and elementary form of stability, of permanence; time is the universal condition of change. The simplest change, and the most general, is also that which is relative to space itself, namely movement. The most elementary form of existence is thus the extended mobile; this is what constitutes the general character of body. If every thing tends to persist in its being, every extended mobile, every mobile (for there can be only extended mobiles) persists in its movement; it perseveres in it with an energy that is exactly equal to the quantity of this movement itself. This tendency to persist in movement is inertia.2 From the lowest level of existence the following are found together: permanence; change; and, in change itself, a tendency towards permanence. But inertia is not a determinate power able to be converted into a constant disposition. It is an infinitely variable power like movement itself, and indefinitely spread throughout the infinity of matter. In order to constitute a real existence where habit can take root, there must be a real unity; there must, therefore, be something within the infinity of matter that, in one form or another, constitutes unity, identity. Such are the principles that determine, in increasingly complicated and particular forms, the synthesis of elements: from external union in space to the most intimate combinations, from the mechanical synthesis of gravity and molecular attraction to the deepest synthesis of chemical affinities. But, in the whole of this primary realm of nature, either the elements that come together, in coming together, change only the relations between themselves; or they reciprocally annul each other in balancing each other out; or they are transformed into a common result, different to the elements. The first of these three degrees is mechanical union; the second, physical union (of, for example, two electricities); the third, chemical union or combination. In all three cases, the change does not seem to occur in a measurable time. Between what could be and what is, we see no milieu, no interval; there is an immediate passage from potentiality to actuality; and, beyond actuality, no potentiality remains that is distinct from it and that outlives it. Here, then, there is no durable change that can give birth to habit, and no permanent potentiality in which it could establish itself. Moreover, the result and the sign of the immediate realization of their potentialities



Of Habit 33

in a single actuality is that all the differences of the constitutive parts disappear in the uniformity of the whole; mechanical, physical or chemical, the synthesis is perfectly homogenous. Even if its constitutive elements were diverse, a homogenous whole is always infinitely divisible into parts that are similar to each other and similar to the whole. No matter how far division goes, the indivisible escapes it. Chemistry searches in vain for the atom, which recedes infinitely. Homogeneity therefore excludes individuality; it excludes veritable unity, and consequently veritable being. In a homogenous whole, there is doubtless being, but there is not a being. In every homogenous synthesis, there is only existence that is infinitely divisible and multiple, in the grip of diverse forces, where fact seems to be confused with law, and law with causality in the uniformity of a general necessity. Here, there is no determinate substance and no individual energy where potentiality could reside, and where a habit could be established and conserved. Hence habit is not possible within this empire of immediacy and homogeneity that is the Inorganic realm. II. As soon as the change effecting synthesis in nature is no longer an immediate reunion or combination, as soon as there is measurable time between the end and the principle, the synthesis is no longer homogenous. Just as there must be a succession of intermediaries in time for the synthesis to be realized, so there must also be instruments, organs. This heterogeneous unity in space is Organization. This successive unity in time is Life – but with succession and heterogeneity, individuality begins. A heterogeneous whole can no longer be divided into parts that are similar to each other and to the whole. It is no longer simply being; it is a being. Hence it is apparently one and the same subject, a determinate substance that develops, in diverse forms and within different temporal periods, its internal potentiality. Here all the conditions for habit seem to come together at once. With life begins individuality. The general character of life is that in the milieu of the world it forms a world apart that is singular and indivisible. Unorganized things, bodies, are delivered over without reserve and immediately subjugated to outside influences that constitute their very existence. These are completely external existences, subject to the general laws of a common necessity. Every living being, in contrast, has its own path, its own particular essence; it has a constant nature in an environment of change. Doubtless, everything that changes is in nature, just as everything that exists is in being. Yet only the living being is a distinct nature, just as it alone is a being. It is therefore in the principle of life that nature, as well as being, really consists. Hence the inorganic realm can be considered, in this sense, as the empire of Destiny, whilst the organic realm can be considered as the empire of Nature. Habit, therefore, can begin only where nature itself begins.

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From the lowest level of life, it seems that the continuity or repetition of a change modifies, relative to this change itself, the disposition of the being, and in this way modifies nature. Life is superior to inorganic existence; but for this very reason life presupposes it as its condition. The simplest form of being is necessarily the most general; it is consequently the condition of all other forms. Hence it is in the inorganic world that organization finds the matter to which it gives form. The heterogeneous synthesis of the organism resolves itself, in the final analysis, into homogenous, and consequently inorganic, principles. Hence life is not an independent and isolated world within the outer world; it is brought about by the conditions and subjected to the general laws of this outer world. Life continually suffers external influences; and yet it nevertheless surmounts them and endlessly triumphs over them. In this way it undergoes change through its relation to its inferior form of existence, which is its condition, its matter; it initiates change, it would appear, by the superior virtue which is its very nature. Life implies the opposition of receptivity and spontaneity. The general effect of the continuity and repetition of change that the living being receives from something other than itself is that, if the change does not destroy it, it is always less and less altered by that change. Conversely, the more the living being has repeated or prolonged a change that it has originated, the more it produces the change and seems to tend to reproduce it. The change that has come to it from the outside becomes more and more foreign to it; the change that it has brought upon itself becomes more and more proper to it. Receptivity diminishes and spontaneity increases. Such is the general law of the disposition, of the habit, that the continuity or the repetition of change seems to engender in every living being. If, therefore, the characteristic of nature, which constitutes life, is the predominance of spontaneity over receptivity, then habit does not simply presuppose nature, but develops in the very direction of nature, and concurs with it. For as long as organization barely distances itself from inorganic homogeneity, for as long as the cause of life is, if not multiple and diffuse, at least still close to being, for as long as its transformations are few and far between – in a word, for as long as the power whose manifestation is life has only a few levels to ascend in order to attain its goal, then existence is scarcely freed from necessity, and habit enters into it only with difficulty. Habit has only marginal access to vegetal life. However, the duration of change here already leaves traces, not only in the material constitution of the plant, but also in the superior form of its life. The wildest plants yield to cultivation: … Haec quoque si quis, Inserat aut scrobibus mandet mutate subactis, Exuerint siluestrem animum, cultuque frequenti, In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur.3



Of Habit 35

III. But vegetation is not the highest form of life. Above vegetal life stands animal life.4 A superior degree of life, however, implies a greater variety of metamorphoses, a more complicated organization, a higher heterogeneity. Consequently, there must be more diverse elements; for the being to absorb them into its own substance, it must prepare and transform them.5 To do so, it must approach them with a suitable organ. Hence it must move, at least in parts, in external space. Ultimately, there must be something – whatever its nature might be – in the being that allows external objects to make an impression on it, and which consequently determines the appropriate movements. Such are the most general conditions of animal life. As one moves up the hierarchy of beings, the relations of existence with the two conditions of permanence and change in nature, namely space and time, are multiplied and defined – and permanence and change are the first conditions of habit. The elementary law of existence is extension, without determinate form or size, and with an indeterminate mobility; this is the general character of body. The first form determining body is the figure defined in its shape, and mobility defined in its direction; this is the general character of the mineral (solids). The first form of life is development, growth in space, defined in both direction and magnitude, in a figure that is also defined in its shape and magnitude; this is vegetal life. The general character and the most apparent sign of animal life is movement in space. This series of relations to space and movement is linked with a series of analogous relations to time. Body exists without becoming anything; it is in some sense outside of time. Vegetal life requires a certain time that it fills with its continuity. Animal life is no longer continuous: all its functions have alternations of rest and movement; all are intermittent6 at least in the succession of wakefulness and sleep; the intermediate functions whose immediate goal is preparatory in vegetal life are subject to shorter and more regular periods. Inorganic existence has, therefore, no definite relation with time. Life implies a determinate, continuous duration. Animal life implies a defined duration, interspersed with empty intervals, and divided into periods; a time that is divided and discrete. It is in the intermittency of functions that spontaneity seems to manifest itself most clearly. Spontaneity is the initiative of movement. Initiative seems evident when movement recommences after having ceased, and in the absence of any external cause. It seems that more force as well as more effort is needed to lift up matter that has collapsed and fallen back on itself. From the lowest level of animal life the double influence of the duration of change begins to manifest itself clearly. In the long run, the elements that first provoked an extraordinary irritation in the organs cease to do so without anything seeming to have changed in the constitution of the organ. Receptivity gradually diminishes. On the other hand, the flow of vital fluids that is subject to the characteristic intermittency of animal life increases, apparently without any underlying external cause, in

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the parts to which they are drawn; they flow there at regular intervals. Habit reveals itself as spontaneity in the regularity of the periods. For example, if a vein is opened more than once at regular intervals, blood comes to move and accumulate there by itself with the same regularity.7 Inflammations, spasms, convulsions make regular reappearances without any appearance of a determining cause in the material of the organism.8 A fever that has come by chance to manifest itself in regular bouts tends to convert itself into a periodic affection; the periodicity becomes essential to it. All of this is a progressive exaltation of spontaneity. IV. If we climb a degree higher within life, the being not only moves itself in its parts, but moves itself as a whole in space; it changes place. At the same time, new, additional organs are developed, which receive impressions of external objects from increasing distances. In this new phase, the contrast of receptivity and spontaneity is expressed with renewed force. In the inorganic world, reaction is exactly equal to action; or, rather, in this completely external and superficial existence, action and reaction merge; it is one and the same actuality, from two different points of view. In life, the action of the external world and the reaction of life itself become increasingly different, and appear to be increasingly independent of one another. In vegetal life, the two still resemble each other and are closely bound together. From the first degree of animal life, however, they become more distant and differentiated, and more or less noticeable agitations in space respond to imperceptible affections of receptivity. But as soon as the animal moves and transports itself as a whole, the opposition of receptivity and spontaneity takes on a wholly new character. External objects make an impression on the organs proper to this higher receptivity by the intermediary of increasingly rare and subtle fluids, air and ether, whilst the movements that seem to respond to these impressions become broader and more complicated. The double law of the contrary influence on beings of the duration of change, depending on whether the being merely suffers the change or sets it off – that is, the double law of habit – must manifest itself here by more apparent and incontestable characteristics. Impressions lose their force the more frequently they are produced. They become more and more slight, affecting the physical constitution of the organs less and less. The gradual weakening of receptivity seems more and more, therefore, to be the effect of a hyper-organic cause. From another perspective, the movements are increasingly disproportionate to the impressions of receptivity. The progress of movement in its principle seems, then, to become more independent of the material alteration of the organism.9 But if reactions are increasingly distanced from and independent of the actions to which they respond, then it seems that a centre is required to serve as a common limit: a centre at which reactions arrive and from which actions depart, and which comes to regulate by itself, in its own way and in its own time, the less and less



Of Habit 37

immediate and necessary relation of the reaction that it produces with the action that it has suffered. This is not simply an indifferent middle term like the centre of opposing forces in a lever; it becomes increasingly necessary to have a centre with the capacity to measure and dispense force.10 What would such a measure be, if not a judge that knows, that values, that foresees and decides? What is this judge, if not the principle that is called the soul? In this way the reign of knowledge, of foresight, seems to emerge in the realm of Nature, and thus the first light of Freedom seems to spring forth. Certainly, these are still obscure, uncertain and contested signs – but life takes another, final step. Motive power arrives, along with the organs of movement, at the highest degree of perfection. The being, having originally arisen from the fatality of the mechanical world, manifests itself within that mechanical world in the most accomplished form of the freest activity. This being is ourselves.11 Here consciousness begins, and in consciousness will and intelligence burst forth. Up to this point, nature is a spectacle for us that we can only see from the outside. We see only the exteriority of the actuality of things; we do not see their dispositions or powers. In consciousness, by contrast, the same being at once acts and sees the act; or, better, the act and the apprehension of the act are fused together. The author, the drama, the actor, the spectator are all one. It is, therefore, only here that we can hope to discover the principle of actuality. Hence it is in consciousness alone that we can find the archetype of habit; it is only in consciousness that we can aspire not just to establish its apparent law but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause.

II I. Consciousness implies knowing and knowing implies intelligence. The general condition of intelligence, as of existence, is unity. But in the absolutely indivisible unity of the simple intuition of an object, knowing fades, and so consequently does consciousness. The idea, the object of knowing, is the intelligible unity of a certain diversity. The synthesis of diversity in the unity of the idea is judgement. The faculty of judgement is the understanding. Knowing is therefore in the understanding; yet the understanding has its own conditions to which it subjects knowing. Diversity is the matter, and unity the form, of quantity. But the understanding grasps quantity only under the particular and determining condition of distinguishing parts – that is, in the form of the unity of plurality, of discrete quantity, of number. The idea of distinct parts is, in turn, determined within the understanding only under the still more particular condition of distinguishing the intervals separating them; in other words, the understanding represents number only within

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the plurality of the limits of a continuous quantity. Yet continuity can be grasped by the understanding only on the basis of coexistence. Continuous, coexisting quantity is extension. Thus quantity is the logical, knowable form of extension; and the understanding represents quantity to itself only in the sensible form of extension, in the intuition of space.12 But there is nothing determinate or unitary in the indeterminateness of space. It is not in this formless and limitless diffusion that I find unity. It is, in fact, in myself that I find it, only then to carry it outside of myself and to oppose myself to it. Moreover, if diversity is represented only in the plurality of the divisions that I establish within extension, and through which I reflect my own unity, then it is necessary, in order to represent the totality or wholeness of that extension, that I combine the different parts, bringing them together. This addition is successive; it implies time. But in time everything passes and nothing remains. How to measure this uninterrupted flux and also this limitless diffusion of succession, if not by something that does not change, but which subsists and remains? And what is this, if not me? For everything that belongs to space is outside time. Substance, at once inside and outside time, is found within me, as the measure of change and permanence alike, as the figure of identity.13 Now, if addition is necessary for the synthesis of diversity in extension, and if addition is possible only in time, does there not have to be, for addition itself to be realized through the continuity of extension, the continuous passage from one extremity to the other through all the intermediate divisions? This passage is movement, the movement that I accomplish whilst being immobile at the heart of my identity.14 Moreover, the parts of space have their own order, and the direction of movement is based on the order of these parts. In order to represent the synthesis of diversity in space, it is necessary not only that I be a substantial subject accomplishing movement, at least in the imagination, but also that I conceive it, that I mark its end, and that I will its direction. Thus extension is, for the understanding, the condition for the development of quantity, and movement is the necessary form of the synthesis of quantity. Only what we can figuratively represent in the field of the imagination is clearly intelligible to us; only what we describe to ourselves in an imaginary space can be conceived distinctly.15 And, by this very fact, within every distinct conception there is enveloped an awareness, more or less obscure, of voluntary activity and personality. But in these terms, movement is still an indeterminate generality. Every real movement has its own quantity. This quantity is neither extension nor speed alone; it is the very degree of the reality of movement, of which speed and amplitude are only the result and the sign; it is intensity. Yet intensity, the degree of reality, finds its direct measure in the energy of the cause: in force. From another perspective, if force is its own measure, it is also measured in that it measures itself out sparingly, making



Of Habit 39

its present energy proportional to the resistance it has to overcome. Movement is the result of an excess of power in relation to resistance. The relation and the measure of both power and resistance are present in the consciousness of effort. In the end, if the subject opposed to the objectivity of extension knows himself only in actions that initiate movement, and if motive activity has its measure in effort, it is in the consciousness of effort that personality, in its highest manifestation as voluntary activity, becomes manifest to itself.16 Effort comprises two elements: action and passion. Passion is the manner of being that has its immediate cause in something other than the being to which it belongs. Action is the manner of being whose immediate cause is the being to which that manner of being belongs. Action and passion are thus opposed to each other; and the coming together of these contraries contains all the possible forms of existence. Effort is therefore not only the primary condition, but also the archetype and essence, of consciousness. Action is the immediate condition for distinguishing the subject and object of knowledge. Hence it is the condition of distinct knowledge. Passion, the opposite of action, is therefore incompatible, by itself, with knowledge and distinct consciousness. It can be known only confusedly, barely distinguished from either the object or the subject of knowledge itself. Clear perception is tightly bound to action; passion appears to consciousness merely as obscure sensation. In the whole expanse of consciousness, perception and sensation are proportionally and inversely related, like the action and passion that they represent; this is a necessary law.17 Effort is in a sense the site of equilibrium where action and passion, and consequently perception and sensation, come into relation. It is the common limit of these opposites, the middle ground where the extremes touch. Effort is realized in the sense of touch. Touch extends from the extremity of passion to that of action. It comprehends in its development all the intermediary degrees between the two; it serves to confirm, at all these different degrees, the law of their reciprocity. For as long as the organs of touch remain outside the sphere of voluntary movement, sensation alone reigns in them. It reigns, first of all, almost exclusively in the form of affection, pleasure or pain. The subject experiencing sensation barely distinguishes himself from it. It is wholly concentrated in him, as if within the obscure heart of his being. Such are the vague affections related to the internal phenomena of vegetal life. Such are the sensations that remain in the organs of voluntary activity when paralysis has abolished movement. Such are, in the end – although already more distinct – the sensations of heat and cold. These are passions which intelligence cannot grasp, which go beyond memory, and which the will cannot recall.18 In contrast, as soon as the organs of touch obey the will without any resistance, it is perception alone that reigns. Sensation, passion has disappeared, and in the field of

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extension that is traversed and measured by movement, everything is now the object of knowing and intelligence. But at the same time, and as resistance fades, there is no longer anything to reflect the principle of action back onto itself; nothing calls it back to itself.19 Its will is lost in the excess of its freedom. The subject experiencing pure passion is completely within himself, and by this very fact cannot yet distinguish and know himself. In pure action, he is completely outside of himself, and no longer knows himself. Personality perishes to the same degree in extreme subjectivity and in extreme objectivity, by passion in the one case and by action in the other. It is in the intermediate region of touch, within this mysterious middle ground of effort, that there is to be found, with reflection, the clearest and most assured consciousness of personality. In the four senses that are spread out between the outer limits of the development of the sense of touch, the same relations are to be found, subject to the same law.20 The sense of touch, in its elementary passivity, does not imply any movement. The senses relative to the functions that prepare vegetal life – those of taste and smell – also presuppose only preparatory movements to put the object in contact with the sense organ. The organ in itself is foreign to movement. Exteriority is in no way involved in the representations produced by these two senses; nor, consequently, is objectivity, which presupposes the imagination of movement and extension; nor, finally, is distinct knowledge and perception. The subject barely knows if the flavour or odour is in him, if it is himself, or if it is something other than him. Philosophers still wonder about this.21 Like heat and cold, these qualities are almost affections. Consciousness does not distinguish parts in them, but only degrees of intensity; they are almost pure sensations. It is not the same for the more subtle senses of sight and hearing. Hearing is no longer, like the sense of taste and smell, the simple instrument of an immediate receptivity. It already implies a mechanism in the organ, a movement in the function; consequently, sound is no longer solely a sensation, and is rather an object of distinct perception. Unknowingly, the ear counts in the sound measurable vibrations that can be pictured in space. Above all, the voice is like an accessory organ that reflects hearing, communicating to it both its activity and its movement.22 The internal movement of the organ proper to hearing is molecular in a certain sense, and barely perceptible; the more pronounced movement of the vocal organ manages to change sound from an inexplicable sensation into a distinct object of imagination and conception, into an idea that has its parts, that can be taken apart and put back together again, explained and taught. In the sense of sight, the mechanism is, if not more complicated, at least more external and apparent. Not only is the external movement of the whole organ of sight added to the internal movements of its parts; not only does clear vision require the concordance of the movements of two distinct organs in the unity of sight, which allows for the development in consciousness, with movement, of the unity of the



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subject and the unity of the object opposed to it – but, what is more, the object proper to vision, namely colour, is manifest only in the very form of extension, and consequently only in movement. Yet visible extension is, to a high degree, an object of clear perception, of precise measure, of exact science; it is the highest form of imagination and figure, the ordinary schema of ideas. Thus from the lowest to the highest points on the scale of the senses, as in the development of the sense of touch, if sensation, though always declining, still does not disappear entirely, then at least perception predominates more and more: perception, which is to say, movement, activity and freedom in the world of diversity and opposition. This is the profound law that is outwardly manifest in the series of the different senses, from the lowest to the highest form of the sense of touch, by the progressive symmetry and independence of the organs, by their separation in space, and, at the same time, by their harmony in movement. Hence it is the development in opposite directions of action and passion that fills the sphere of consciousness. Consciousness, knowledge itself, resides in action and develops with it; but action in movement, that is, as contrasted with passion. At the higher pole of absolute activity, just as at the lower pole of absolute passivity, consciousness, or at least distinct consciousness, is no longer possible. Any distinction, and therefore any knowing, would here be absorbed in impersonality. II. Since there is nothing in distinct consciousness without the general condition of movement, and since movement is in time, the condition, the being of consciousness is to be in time. Time is the first law and the necessary form of consciousness. Everything in consciousness is thus a change that has its duration in a constant, unchanging subject. What, then, is the result, in the sphere of consciousness, of the very duration of change? We have seen that action (action within movement, at least) and passion are always, in the realm of consciousness, proportionally and inversely related to each other. The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it. Prolonged or repeated sensation diminishes gradually and eventually fades away. Prolonged or repeated movement becomes gradually easier, quicker and more assured. Perception, which is linked to movement, similarly becomes clearer, swifter, and more certain.23 In the consciousness of movement itself there is an element of sensibility: effort. Effort diminishes according to the continuity and repetition of movement. Reciprocally, in every sensation – perhaps with the exception of the internal affections of the vital functions – mobility and perception have a role. This is a role that continuity or repetition does not destroy, but which, on the contrary, it develops and perfects. In applying itself to the most obscure sensations in the senses of taste and smell, activity releases them in a certain manner from their

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subject and gradually transforms them into objects of distinct perception, adding judgement to the feeling, or entirely replacing it. Activity increasingly reduces, in the warm and the cold, in odour, colour or sound, the element of affection and pure sensation, and develops the element of knowledge and judgement. In this way, the sensations in which we seek only pleasure soon fade. Taste becomes more and more obtuse in the one who, by passion, is delivered over to the frequent use of strong liquors; in the connoisseur who discerns flavours, it becomes more and more delicate and subtle. As the sensation gradually diminishes, so too do the pleasure and pain attached to it – particularly the pain. Action and pleasure are bound together; duration does not decrease the pleasure in the action, but rather augments it.24 In movement itself, fatigue and struggle recede along with effort. And in sensation it is doubtless activity that intervenes to maintain or to resuscitate the transient sensual pleasures. It is activity that, even with painful sensations, gradually disentangles the agreeable emotions caught up in them, and, when the pain disappears, retains and develops the pleasure. Thus everywhere, in every circumstance, continuity or repetition – that is, duration – weakens passivity and excites activity. But in this story of two agonistic powers there is a common trait, and this trait explains all the rest. Whenever a sensation is not painful, to the degree that it is prolonged or repeated – to the degree, consequently, that it fades away – it becomes more and more of a need. Increasingly, if the impression that is necessary to provoke the sensation no longer occurs, one’s distress and unease reveal an impotence of desire in the realm of sensibility.25 From another perspective, as effort fades away in movement and as action becomes freer and swifter, the action itself becomes more of a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness.26 This is particularly evident in those movements, initially more or less voluntary, that gradually degenerate into convulsive ones, which we call tics. In this way, then, continuity or repetition brings about a sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility, and the will in activity.27 In activity, it reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion – for this requires an external cause – but calls for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation. The necessary condition of passion is the contrast between the present state of the subject experiencing it, and the state to which the cause of the passion tends to bring him. Like is unaffected by like.28 Electrical attraction presupposes the opposition of electrical states; chemical affinity presupposes the opposition of elements; irritation presupposes the opposition of the irritating substance and the organ on which it makes an impression. Such is the irritation determining the preparatory or



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complementary functions of assimilation.29 Sensation requires, then, contrariety between the state of the sensed object, and the state of the sense itself. Hence if there develops within sensibility, as it receives the same impression, a tendency to persist in the same state to which the impression has brought it, or else to come back to this state, then the opposition between the state of the subject and the state to which the external impression has brought it increasingly disappears, and thus sensation continues to fade. For example, every uniform sensation that is repeated over a long period dulls sensibility, inducing sleep, all the more so when the sensation is strong and when sensibility is keen. Such is the ordinary effect of a continual swinging or rocking, or of a monotonous noise, particularly in childhood.30 But if the movement or the noise ceases, sleep also comes to an end. Rest and silence awaken. Noise and movement, therefore, only induce sleep by developing in the sensory organs a sort of obscure activity which brings them up to the tone of the sensation. This destroys sensation, but at the same time creates a need for it. As soon as the cause of the sensation disappears, this need manifests itself in worry and wakefulness. It is in this way, that is to say, by the progressive development of an internal activity, that the progressive weakening of passivity is to be explained. From another perspective, movement implies passion: there is action in the cause, and passion in the subject of the movement, which suffers the action of the cause. Hence if movement, as it is repeated, becomes more and more involuntary, it is not in the will but in the passive element of the movement itself that a secret activity gradually develops. To be precise, it is not action that gives birth to or strengthens the continuity or repetition of locomotion; it is a more obscure and unreflective tendency, which goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there. Habit exercises only an indirect influence on the simple acts of will and intelligence, in pulling down the obstacles before them, and in securing the means for them. Similarly, the desire awakened in the sense as sensation fades, which is revealed only by its effects, is not a veritable activity. It is a blind tendency that derives from passion as much as from action. In this way, continuity or repetition dulls sensibility, whereas it excites the power of movement. But it weakens the one and excites the other in the same way, by one and the same cause: the development of an unreflective spontaneity, which breaks into passivity and the organism, and increasingly establishes itself there, beyond, beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness. The gradual weakening of the sensations and the increasing ease of the movements could perhaps be explained hypothetically by some change (which anatomy has not discovered) in the physical constitution of the organs.31 But no organic modification can explain the tendency, the inclination whose progress coincides with the decline of sensation and effort. The attempts made to explain the increasing ease and certainty of the movements, and the disappearance of sensation, by the progress of

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attention, of will and of intelligence,32 might still be considered capable of a certain level of success. But if the sensation disappears in the long run because attention tires of it and turns elsewhere, how is it that sensibility increasingly demands this sensation that the will abandons? If movement becomes swifter and easier because intelligence knows better all its parts, and because the will synthesizes the action with more precision and assurance, how is it that the increasing facility of movement coincides with the diminution of will and consciousness? Both physical and rationalist theories are lacking on this point. The law of habit can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom. III. However, although movement, as it becomes a habit, leaves the sphere of will and reflection, it does not leave that of intelligence. It does not become the mechanical effect of an external impulse, but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will. This inclination is formed gradually, and consciousness, so far as it can trace it, always finds that it inclines towards the end that the will had originally proposed. But every inclination towards a goal implies intelligence. But in reflection and the will, the end proposed by intelligence is an object opposed to itself, as the more or less distant goal of movement. In the progress of habit, inclination, as it takes over from the will, comes closer and closer to the actuality that it aims to realize; it increasingly adopts its form. The duration of movement gradually transforms the potentiality, the virtuality, into a tendency, and gradually the tendency is transformed into action. The interval that the understanding represents between the movement and its goal gradually diminishes; the distinction is effaced; the end whose idea gave rise to the inclination comes closer to it, touches it and becomes fused with it. An immediate intelligence, in which nothing separates the subject and object of thought, gradually replaces the reflection that traverses and measures distances between contraries, the middle ground between opposing terms. In reflection and will, the end of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished: something that should be, that can be and which is not yet. It is a possibility to be realized. But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realized in it. The idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines. Habit becomes more and more a substantial idea. The obscure intelligence that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought are fused together. Ultimately, it is more and more outside the sphere of personality, beyond the influence of the central organ of the will – that is to say, within the immediate organs of movements – that the inclinations constituting the habit are formed, and the ideas are realized. Such inclinations, such ideas become more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being of these organs. The spontaneity of desire and intuition



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is dispersed, in some way, as it develops, within the indeterminate multiplicity of the organism. But it is by a succession of imperceptible degrees that inclinations take over from acts of will. It is also by an imperceptible degradation that these inclinations, born from custom, often decline if custom comes to be interrupted, and that the movements removed from the will return to its sphere after some time. The transition between these two states cannot be sensed; its dividing line is everywhere and nowhere. Consciousness feels itself expire along with the will, and then come back to life with it, by a gradation and degradation which are continuous; and consciousness is the first, immediate and unique measure of continuity. Not only, then, do the movements that habit gradually removes from the will not leave the sphere of intelligence to pass into the grip of a blind mechanism, but they also do not withdraw from the same intelligent activity from which they were born.33 A foreign force does not come to direct these movements; it is still the same force that forms their principle, but that, within them, surrenders itself more and more to the attraction of its own thought. It is the same force that, without losing anything of its higher unity in personality, proliferates without being divided; that descends without going under; that dissolves itself, in different ways, into its inclinations, acts and ideas; that is transformed in time, and that is disseminated in space. Hence habit is not an external necessity of constraint, but a necessity of attraction and desire.34 It is, indeed, a law, a law of the limbs,35 which follows on from the freedom of spirit. But this law is a law of grace. It is the final cause that increasingly predominates over efficient causality and which absorbs the latter into itself. And at that point, indeed, the end and the principle, the fact and the law, are fused together within necessity. Yet what is the difference between the tendencies engendered by the continuity or repetition of action, and the primitive tendencies that constitute our nature? What is the difference between habit and instinct? Like habit, instinct is the tendency towards an end without will and distinct consciousness. Only, instinct is more unreflective, more irresistible, more infallible. Habit draws increasingly near to, perhaps without ever attaining, the reliability, necessity and perfect spontaneity of instinct. Between habit and instinct, between habit and nature, the difference is merely one of degree, and this difference can always be lessened and reduced. Like effort between action and passion, habit is the dividing line, or the middle term, between will and nature; but it is a moving middle term, a dividing line that is always moving, and which advances by an imperceptible progress from one extremity to the other. Habit is thus, so to speak, the infinitesimal differential, or, the dynamic fluxion from Will to Nature. Nature is the limit of the regressive movement proper to habit.

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Consequently, habit can be considered as a method – as the only real method – for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will. In descending gradually from the clearest regions of consciousness, habit carries with it light from those regions into the depths and dark night of nature. Habit is an acquired nature,36 a second nature37 that has its ultimate ground in primitive nature, but which alone explains the latter to the understanding. It is, finally, a natured nature, the product and successive revelation of naturing nature. Habit transforms voluntary movements into instinctive movements. In the most voluntary movement, the will proposes and the understanding represents to itself only the external form and the extremity of the movement. However, between the movement in space and the exertion of the motive power there is a gap filled by initially resistant means, and in effort we have only a vague consciousness of this resistance. How does the motive power apply itself to resistance? Of this we are no longer aware. As we step back to the origin from the end, the obscurity increases.38 Yet by its repeated or prolonged exercise, we learn to adjust the quantity of effort, and to choose its point of application, in relation to the end that we wish to attain; at the same time, the consciousness of effort is effaced. In this way, the organs become so accustomed to movements requiring force or serious effort that they become incapable of more subtle movements for a long time afterwards. A man accustomed to carrying out strong movements with the muscles of his hands and fingers writes less firmly than another.40 The principle of movement has thus made itself, without knowing it, a figure, an idea in action,39 from which it cannot be unbound, and it involuntarily, even convulsively, surpasses any end placed before its accustomed end. We had a kind of confused and inexplicable understanding of the original application of motive power to the organ of movement, and a sort of ineffable intention that habit was still able to influence. Habit brings both this obscure consciousness of effort and the clear consciousness of the external direction of movement in space to the same point. The different degrees of consciousness, from the highest to the most humble, dissolve into each other, and in this way the movement as a whole occurs as if by itself; it becomes completely natural, instinctive, as the first application of the motive power to the organ of movement always is. However, if effort implies resistance, resistance in turn only manifests itself in effort. How are we to get out of this circle, and where are we to find its beginning? Will, in general, presupposes the idea of the object; but the idea of the object equally presupposes that of the subject. Therefore effort necessarily requires an effortless antecedent tendency, which in its development encounters resistance; and it is at this point that the will finds itself



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in the self-reflection of activity, and is awakened through effort.41 The will, in general, presupposes a prior inclination – one that is involuntary – in which the subject that develops from it is not yet distinguished from its object. Hence voluntary movement finds not only its matter, its substance, but also its source and origin in desire.42 Desire is a primordial instinct, in which the goal of the act is fused with the act itself, the idea with the realization, the thought with the spirit of spontaneity; this is the state of nature – it is nature itself. The gradual, or successive, fading of consciousness and will in the voluntary part of the movement corresponds, therefore, to the simultaneous series of the states of will and consciousness within the parts of the whole movement, from the region of will to that of nature. The final degree of habit meets nature itself. Hence nature is, as this final degree, merely the immediation of the end and the principle, of the reality and ideality of movement, or of change in general, in the spontaneity of desire. The more we step back from the final actuality of movement to its beginning, the more we descend from a unity of direction into an indistinct multiplicity in which motive energy rises up from all quarters.43 This is the end point towards which the progress of habit leads: the dispersion of movement in the multiplicity of tendencies and in the diversity of the organs. In nature also – in primitive nature just as in this second nature that is habit – it is thus possible to perceive, beneath the central unity of personality, the mysterious dispersion of force and of intelligence, which is disseminated and absorbed in the substantiality of its own ideas. Motive activity includes, then, in a sort of continuous progression, all the different powers that stretch from will to instinct. But the lower powers are contained in it only in a reduced and curtailed form. They develop into a varied series of functions and organs, from the lofty peak of life, illuminated by the light of thought, to the lowest and darkest regions. From locomotive functions to the basic functions necessary for nutrition, from the latter to nutrition itself and to vegetation, movements that can be represented and measured in extension are replaced by almost imperceptible movements, then by molecular movements, and, finally, by chemical transformations and the most secret vital operations. Mechanics yields more and more to the inexplicable and unrepresentable dynamism of life. The imaginary field closes up, the flame of the understanding is extinguished, the will is eclipsed, and consciousness fades. At the same time, the centralization of the organism diminishes with the symmetry and the opposition of the organs. The diffusion of life in a plethora of independent centres takes over from the rule of cerebral unity.44 The influence of habit, along with that of the will, is still powerful in relation to the mixed functions, those superior to vegetal life: as we have seen above, this manifests itself particularly in the way in which it affects the periods that are its most distinguished characteristic. Habit extends also to vegetal life: it profoundly changes the instincts within it; it alters, and to a large extent forms, temperament. The muscles and articulations that are exercised become stronger and larger and at the same time more agile: nutrition is more powerful in

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them. One becomes accustomed over time to the most violent poisons. In relation to chronic illnesses, medicines lose their power, and they have to be changed from time to time.45 Movements or situations that initially are most difficult and tiring become over time the most convenient, and end up by making themselves into indispensable conditions of the functions with which they have always been associated; in the same way, the most unhealthy air and food become the very conditions of health.46 Reflection on habit is one of the most important aspects of hygiene, of diagnostics and of therapeutics.47 Habit is nullified, or at least seems to be nullified, only in the most elementary functions of the organism. But even in the abysses that seem forbidden to it, the last and fading rays of light that habit draws from consciousness illuminate, in the deepest heart of nature, the mystery of the identification of the ideal and the real, of the thing and thought, and of all the contraries that the understanding separates, which are fused in an inexplicable actuality of intelligence and desire. The same principle and the same analogies reveal the secret of the abnormal and parasitic life that develops within regular life, which has its periods, its course, its own birth and death; is it an idea or a being which constitutes illness, or is it not rather at one and the same time an idea and a being, a concrete and substantial idea beyond consciousness?48 Would this not also be the divine secret of the transmission of life, as of a creative idea, which detaches and isolates itself in the transport of love for life that is its own life, creating for itself its own body, its own world and destiny?49 In the same way, would this not be the secret of the transmission of illness itself, of the substantial idea of illness, which bides its time in order to become in the son what it was in the father, and which is propagated with its forms and its immutable periods from generation to generation?50 In the end, not only does the most elevated form of life in humanity – motive activity – contain in an abbreviated form all the inferior forms that develop in the subordinate functions; but also the series of these functions is itself only the summary of the general development of life in the world, from kingdom to kingdom, from genus to genus, from species to species, right down to the most imperfect rudiments and the simplest elements of existence. The world, nature as a whole, presents itself as a continuous progression in which each term is the condition and the matter of all the higher terms, the form of all the inferior terms, and in which, consequently, each develops and is represented, in its parts and in detail, in the whole of the series that envelops it. In this way, in its progress to the heart of the interior life of consciousness, habit presents in a successive form the universality of the terms that mark in the exterior world, in the objective and immobile form of space, the progressive development of the powers of nature. But, in space, the distinction of forms implies limitation; there is no difference that is not determinate and finite. Nothing, therefore, can show that there is an absolute continuity between the limits, and, consequently, that from one extremity of the progression to the other there is the unity of one and the



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same principle. The continuity of nature is only a possibility, an ideality that cannot be demonstrated in nature itself.51 But this ideality is presented in the reality of the progression of habit; it draws its proof from it, by the most powerful of analogies. In man, the progression of habit leads consciousness, by an uninterrupted degradation, from will to instinct, and from the accomplished unity of the person to the extreme diffusion of impersonality. There is, therefore, a single force, a single intelligence that is, in the life of man, the principle of all its functions and forms. The conditions of reflection and memory, however, disappear along with those of space and movement. The most involuntary functions of our life – those of nutrition, for example – are not old habits transformed into instincts.52 Not only do they seem never to have depended on our will, but they have never been able to depend on it; they are composed of imperceptible movements and organic alterations that stand outside the sphere of imagination and understanding. But habit leads voluntary movements to the same state, transforming them into instincts. The fading of the will and consciousness in the stratified series of vital functions can only be the sign, therefore, of the gradual disappearance, in the identity of one and the same mind, of the conditions of the understanding and reflective will.53 It is the same in the series of kingdoms, of genera, of species. The most elementary mode of existence, with the most perfect organization, is like the final moment of habit, realized and substantiated in space in a physical form. The analogy of habit penetrates its secret and delivers its sense over to us.54 All the way down to the confused and multiple life of the zoophyte, down to plants, even down to crystals,55 it is thus possible to trace, in this light, the last rays of thought and activity as they are dispersed and dissolved without yet being extinguished, far from any possible reflection, in the vague desires of the most obscure instincts. The whole series of beings is therefore only the continuous progression of the successive powers of one and the same principle, powers enveloping one another in the hierarchy of the forms of life, powers which develop in the opposite direction within the progression of habit. The lower limit is necessity – Destiny, as might be said, but in the spontaneity of Nature; the higher limit is the Freedom of the understanding. Habit descends from the one to the other; it brings these contraries together, and in doing so reveals their intimate essence and their necessary connection. IV. Action and passion are not closed in between effort and the final degree of vital spontaneity. They go beyond and higher than this in both will and intelligence. The influence of habit also extends to these higher and purer regions of the mind and the heart. But we have determined the law of habit, and we have assigned its principle within the original form and the primary conditions of consciousness. It will be sufficient for us here to verify the generality of this law and principle. As soon as the soul arrives at self-consciousness, it is no longer merely the form, the end or even the principle of organization; a world opens within it that

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increasingly separates and detaches itself from the life of the body, and in which the soul has its own life, its own destiny and its own end to accomplish. It is to this superior life that the incessant progress of life and nature seems – without being able to attain it – to aspire, as if to its perfection, to its good.56 This higher life, in contrast, has its own good within itself; and it knows this, looks for it, embraces it, at once as its own good and as good itself, as absolute perfection. But pleasure and pain have their grounds in good and evil; they are the sensible signs of good and evil. Here, therefore, in this world of the soul, the truest good is accompanied by the truest form of sensibility; such are the passions of the soul – that is, feeling. Feeling is distinct from the spiritual and moral activity that pursues good and evil, though it gathers their impressions. Continuity or repetition must therefore gradually weaken feeling, just as it weakens sensation; it gradually extinguishes pleasure and pain in feeling, as it does in sensation. Similarly, it changes into a need the very feeling that it destroys, making its absence more and more unbearable for the soul. At the same time, repetition or continuity makes moral activity easier and more assured. It develops within the soul not only the disposition, but also the inclination and the tendency to act, just as in the organs it develops the inclination for movement. In the end, it gradually brings the pleasure of action to replace the more transient pleasure of passive sensibility. In this way, as habit destroys the passive emotions of pity, the helpful activity and the inner joys of charity develop more and more in the heart of the one who does good.57 In this way, love is augmented by its own expressions;58 in this way, it reanimates with its penetrating flame the impressions that have been extinguished, and at each instant reignites the exhausted sources of passion. Ultimately, in the activity of the soul, as in that of movement, habit gradually transforms the will proper to action into an involuntary inclination. Mores and morality are formed in this manner. Virtue is first of all an effort and wearisome; it becomes something attractive and a pleasure only through practice, as a desire that forgets itself or that is unaware of itself, and gradually it draws near to the holiness of innocence. Such is the very secret of education: its art consists in attracting someone towards the good by action, thus fixing the inclination for it.59 In this way a second nature is formed. Hence at the centre of the soul itself, just as in this inferior world that it animates and that it is not, the unreflective spontaneity of desire and the impersonality of nature are to be found again as forming the limit to which the progress of habit makes action return; and here again it is the natural spontaneity of desire that is the very substance of action, at the same time as being its source and primary origin. The moral world is the highest domain of freedom. It proposes its own end to and for itself, and it commands itself in executing action. But, just as in movement, if it is the will that poses the goal in space, and determines the direction, it is not the will – or at least it is not reflective will – that works out and devises in advance the



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very production of movement; for this can only arise from the depths of instinct and desire, where the idea of nature becomes being and substance. In the same way, in the moral world the understanding distinguishes the end and the will proposes it, but it is neither the will nor the abstract understanding that can initially stir the powers of the soul at their source so as to push them towards the good.60 It is the good itself, at least the idea of the good, which descends into these depths, engendering love in them and raising that love up to itself. Will constitutes only the form of the action; the unreflective freedom of Love constitutes all its substance, and love can no longer be distinguished from the contemplation of what it loves, nor contemplation from its object; and it is this that forms the source, the basis and the necessary beginning: this is the state of nature, whose primordial spontaneity envelops and presupposes all will. Nature lies wholly in desire, and desire, in turn, lies in the good that attracts it. In this way the profound words of a profound theologian might be confirmed: ‘Nature is prevenient grace’. It is God within us, God hidden solely by being so far within us in this intimate source of ourselves, to whose depths we do not descend.61 V. Ultimately, even in the sphere of the pure understanding and of abstract reason,62 the law of habit is still to be found, and consequently also the principle of this law, namely natural spontaneity. The understanding develops at the same time and in the same direction as motive activity; it develops in the opposite direction to sensibility and to passivity in general.63 Yet passivity is not completely nullified in it. Understanding, distinguished from simple intuition, is not pure activity. Every distinct perception and every idea implies, as we have seen, a diversity represented in the form of an extension, whose intervals are traversed in thought. Every operation of the understanding envelops the imagination with a movement. It is this characteristic that has led it rightly to be named discursive reason. Yet, as we have also seen, every movement implies, to whatever degree, passion. Sometimes it is the object of the understanding that provides the impulsion; in this case, it is as if it were completely passive. Sometimes the understanding sets itself in motion, and in this case it combines passion and action within itself: the former in its movement, the latter in the attention that determines a direction and a purpose in the intellectual movement. Here, still, continuity and repetition exert opposing influences on passivity and activity. Every perception and conception that is inattentive, involuntary – and consequently passive to a certain degree – is gradually diminished as it is prolonged or repeated. It does not disappear as completely as sensation or feeling; but it becomes more and more confused, and increasingly escapes memory, reflection and consciousness. In contrast, the more the understanding and the imagination exert themselves on the successive synthesis of ideas or images, the easier this becomes for them and the more their exercise becomes prompt, assured and precise; at the

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same time, it becomes a tendency that is more and more independent of the will. The passive movements of the understanding become, more and more, an inclination. It is not, as has been supposed, the ideas or images that call one another to come together, that attract, or that move towards each other with increasing speed, like bodies gravitating in space. In images and ideas there is no movement or principle of movement. It is not the association of ideas that explains habit;64 it is rather by the law, by the principle of habit that the association of ideas can be explained. This inclination, into which the activity of the understanding and imagination is gradually absorbed, is natural spontaneity, developed in movement and dragging with it, as if in a rapid current, attention, will and consciousness itself, at the same time dispersing and scattering everywhere in an indefinite diversity of independent ideas and images – as if in a diffuse and multiple life – the unity and the individuality of intelligence. In this way, the first impulsion of the heart in the torrent of circulation is succeeded, as one grows older, by the proper tonicity and the diffuse energy of the ramifications of the vascular system. In the end, this state of nature to which habit leads thought back, as it leads back the will and movement, is the condition and the primary source of any distinct thought, as it is of any express will and of any determinate movement. How can we deliberate about grasping in the present or retrieving from the past an absent idea? Either we are looking for what we already know, or we do not know what we are looking for. Before the distinct idea that reflection searches out, before reflection itself, there must be some kind of unreflective and indistinct idea, which occasions reflection and constitutes its matter, its beginning and its basis. Vainly would reflection withdraw into itself, for it would only seek and yet escape itself forever.65 Reflective thought implies, therefore, a prior intuition, immediate and confused, in which the idea is distinguished neither from the subject that thinks it nor from thought itself. It is in the uninterrupted current of involuntary spontaneity, flowing noiselessly in the depths of the soul, that the will draws limits and determines forms. In every thing, the Necessity of Nature is the chain on which Freedom unfolds itself. But this is a moving and living chain; it is the necessity of desire, love and grace. VI. In summary, the Understanding and the Will relate only to limits, to ends, to extremities. Movement measures intervals. Intervals imply the continuity, infinitely divisible, of a milieu. Continuity implies the indivisible middle term, where, across the entire milieu, at whatever distance from either of the extremities, the extremities touch one another, and the contraries merge. The comprehension of the limits, as distinct limits, thus envelops the comprehension of the milieu; and the willing of an end, the willing of the means. This willing and this understanding are simply immediate, and infinitely so. Being infinitely divisible, the milieu can never be exhausted, and consequently we can never penetrate it. The mediated intelligence



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and will relating to the extremities envelop, then, an immediate understanding and will relating to the milieu. Immediate intelligence and will are like the middle term within movement across the entire milieu. The poles touch each other everywhere, the principle and the end merging. This immediate understanding is concrete thought, within which the idea is fused with being. This immediate will is desire, or rather love, which possesses and desires at the same time. This thought and this desire, this idea substantiated in the movement of love, is Nature. The understanding and the will determine only that which is discrete and distinct. Nature makes continuity concrete, as the plenitude of reality. The will is oriented to ends; nature suggests and furnishes the means. Art, the work of will, has purchase only on limits, on surfaces, on the outside; it can act only on the exteriority of the mechanical world, and possesses no other instrument than movement. Nature works on the inside, and, even in art, is the sole constituent of depth and solidity. Science, the work of the understanding, traces and constructs the general contours of the ideality of things. Nature alone provides, in experience, their substantial integrity. Science defines, by means of the extensive unity of logical or mathematical form. Nature constitutes, in the intensive and dynamic unity of reality.66 Between the ultimate depths of nature and the highest point of reflective freedom, there are an infinite number of degrees measuring the development of one and the same power, and the higher we rise through them, extension – the condition of knowledge – increases with the distinction and the interval of the opposites. This is like a spiral whose principle resides in the depths of nature, and yet which ultimately flourishes in consciousness. Habit comes back down this spiral, teaching us of its origin and genesis. Hence habit is enclosed within the region of opposition and movement. It remains beneath pure activity, simple apperception, unity and the divine identity of thought and being; and it has for a limit and final end the imperfect identity of the ideal and the real, of being and thought, in the spontaneity of nature. The history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity. Finally, the disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being.

Notes 1. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, II, 2: 0Eqi/zetai de_ to_ u(p’ a)gwge=j mh_ e0mfu&tou tw~| polla&kij kinei=sqai\ pw&j, ou#twj h1dh to_ e0nerghtiko_n, o# e1n toi= a)yuxoi=j ou)x o(rw~men. Ou)de\ ga_r a1n muria&kij r0i/yh|j a1nw to_n liqon, oude/pote

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poih&sei tou=to mh_ bi/a| [‘By our often moving in a certain way a habit not innate in us is finally trained to be operative in that way, and this we do not observe in inanimate objects, for not even if you throw a stone upwards ten thousand times will it ever rise upward unless under the operation of force’]. 2. See Leibniz, passim and particularly the Theodicy. 3. Virgil, Georgics, II, 49: ‘… And yet, even these, Should one graft them or transplant them into well-prepared beds, will outgrow their savagery, and under ceaseless training, will soon follow your call in whatever ways you wish.’ 4. Bichat’s organic life, which considers such life only within the animal realm. 5. On the physiological character and rank of these functions (digestive, respiratory, excretive), see Buisson, De la division la plus naturelle des phénomènes physiologiques considérés chez l’homme. With this author, I consider these functions as forming the intermediary and the transition between Bichat’s two lives. 6. Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, art. IV. Cf. Aristotle, On Sleep and Waking. 7. Stahl, Physiologia, p. 298, in Theoria medica vera: ‘De moto tonicu, et inde pendent motu sanguinis particulari, quo demonstrator, stante circulation, sanguinem et cum eo commeantes humores ad quamlibet corporis partem, prae aliis, copiosius diriqi et propelli posse, etc. [Concerning tonic motion, and particularly the dependent motion of blood, it is demonstrated that when the circulation is at rest, blood and its attendant humours flowing to a particular part of the body can be more fully directed and driven]’ etc. (Jena, 1692, in-4°). 8. Richter, De affectibus periodicis (1702, in-4°); Rhetius, De morbis habitualibus (Halle, 1698, in-4°); Jung, De consuetudinis efficacia generali in actibus vitalibus (Halle, 1705, in-4°) – these are theses defended under Stahl’s supervision. Cf. Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme, XIII, I. 9. Stahl, Physiologia, p. 214: ‘This is so true that it represents a stumbling-block for the frivolous opinions of the moderns, which assign materially similar causes to the same events.’ Within the opposing doctrine of Cartesian mechanism, see, in particular, Buffon, Discours sur la nature des animaux, on the equality of action and reaction. 10. Cf. Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 6. 11. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, IV, 10; Maine de Biran, passim. 12. Cf. Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, I: Noei=n ou)k e1stin a1neu fanta&smatoj. Kai o( now~n ..., ka~n mh~ poso_n noh~| ti_qetai pro_ o0mma&ton poso_n, noei= d’ou)x h[| poso&n. [‘It is impossible even to think without some mental image. The thinker, though he may not be thinking of a finite magnitude, still puts a finite magnitude before his eyes, though he does not think of it as such’] – De anima, III, 7, 8. – Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ‘On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’. Stahl, Negotium otiosum seu schiamachia (Halle, 1720, in-4°; this is a defence of one of his doctrines in response to Leibniz), p. 169: Nihil quicquam, non solum physici, sed nequidem ullo sensu moralis mente concipi seu definite com prehendi posse agnosco, nisi sub exemplo figurabili … seu imaginativa



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repraesentatione [‘It must be recognised that we cannot conceive or comprehend anything definitely, be it physical or moral, except in the guise of a figurative example … or in an imaginative representation’], p. 39: Anima, quicquid contemplatur, cogitat, reminiscitur, non sub alio concipiendi modo assequitur, quam sub figurabili, corporalibus finibus seu terminis circumscripto [‘Soul, with whatever is being contemplated, thinks, remembers, pursues understanding under no other mode of comprehension than that of shape circumscribed by corporeal limits or boundaries’], p. 417: Omnibus autem hisce considerationibus fundamentum substernit differentia lo&gou et logismou=; rationis absque phantasia (cujus exemplum sunt omnes sensus, in objectis suis simplicioribus) et ratiocinationis, seu cogitationis cum phantasia; cui nihil subjacet, nisi quod figurabile est [‘The fundamental difference between intuition (logos) and calculation (logismou) underlies all considerations; intuition is without a mental image (an example of which are the senses, in relation to their own proper objects) whilst calculation is thought with mental imagery, in which there is nothing incapable of figuration’] – Physiologia, p. 297. – Destutt de Tracy, Eléments d’idéologie, I, 173. Cf. Maine de Biran, Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, p. 182. 13. Cf. Kant, loc. cit. 14. Aristotle, loc. cit., Kant, loc. cit. 15. Kant, ibid. 16. Maine de Biran, passim. On the idea of effort as the primary source of knowledge, cf. Rey-Régis, Histoire naturelle et raisonnée de l’âme. 17. Maine de Biran, Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, p. 54. 18. Ibid., pp. 29ff. 19. Ibid. 20. Cf. ibid. Some interesting investigations concerning the difference of sensation and perception can be found in Paffe’s Considérations sur la sensibilité (1832, in-8°). 21. This is the question of the objectivity of secondary qualities. 22. Buffon, Discours sur la nature des animaux; Maine de Biran (Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, p. 64) honours Bonatterre (Notice sur le sauvage d’Aveyron) with this correct and ingenious theory of the activity of hearing, when he had in fact only copied Buffon literally without giving notice of having done so. 23. Destutt de Tracy, Éléments d’idéologie, pp. 217, 226; Maine de Biran, Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, passim; Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, II, 391; Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, pp. 72–3; Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, art. V; Schrader, De consuetudine (1829, in-8°), p. 6. Most of the authors who have examined habit have apprehended this law. 24. Matthieu Buisson, De la division … des phénomènes physiologiques, p. 71. 25. Maine de Biran, Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, p. 97. 26. Ibid. 27. Thomas Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Man. 28. Cf. Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 4, 33–4: A)paqouj o0ntoj tou~ o1moi/on u~po\ tou~ o(moi/ou.

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29. Ibid.; Chaussier, as cited by Buisson, loc. cit., p. 232. 30. Cf. Paul-Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme, XI, 2. 31. Cf. Christian Isaac, De Consuetudine ejusque effectibus ex fibra sensim mutate ducendis (Erfurt, 1737, in-4°). 32. See Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie (Œuvres, VIII), 82, 9; Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, p. 175. 33. Berkeley, Siris, p. 123: ‘it being evident, that what is done by rule must proceed from something that understands the rule; therefore, if not from the musician himself, from some other active intelligence, the same perhaps which governs bees and spiders, and moves the limbs of those who walk in their sleep.’ 34. William Porterfield, A treatise on the eye, the manner and phenomena of vision, II, 17. 35. Saint Paul, Romans, 7.23: Ble&pw de\ e1teron no&mon e)n toi#j me&lesi& mou a) ntistrateuo&menon tw~| no&mw~| tou~ noo&j mou. [‘But then I find quite another law in my members which conflicts with the law of my thinking’]. 36. Galen, De motu musculorum, II, 17: ‘Epi&khtoj fu&sij. 37. Aristotle, Of Memory and Recollection, 2. 38. Joan Baptist Van Helmont, De morbis archealibus (Ortus medicinae, Amsterdam, 1648, in-4°), p. 521, a: Non enim modum novi quo initia seminalia suas dotes exprimunt, qui plane ut a priori mihi ignotus est [‘Indeed, I cannot grasp the means by which the seminal principles express their own virtues and their production; this is simply a priori unknown to me’]. 39. Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme, XIII, I. 40. Stahl, De vera diversitate corporis mixti et vivi (Theoria medica vera, pp. 78–9; Negotium otiosum seu schiamachia, p. 72). 41. Maine de Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (1802, in-8°), p. 28, note. 42. Van Helmont, loc. cit., p. 521, b: ‘But only the ideas of desire are guiding motives’. 43. See Barthez, loc. cit., V, I, on muscular strength. 44. See Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, art. II ff. 45. Galen, De sanitate tuenda, V, 9; Hoffmann, Medicina rationalis systematica, II, XIV, 17; Hahn, De consuetudine (Leiden, 1751, in-4°), p. 72. 46. Hippocrates, Aphorisms, II, 50: Ta_ e0k pollou~ xro&nou sunh&qea, ka&n h[| xei&rw, tw~n a&sunh&qwn h[sson e0noxlei=n ei1wqe. [‘Those things which one has been accustomed to for a long time, although worse than things which one is not accustomed to, usually give less disturbance; but a change must sometimes be made to things one is not accustomed to’]; Wetzel, De consuetudine circa rerum non naturallum usum (Basle, 1730, in-4°); Jungnickel, De consuetudine altera natura (Wittenburg, 1787, in-4°), pp. 12ff.; Hahn, De consuetudine, II; Barthez, loc. cit., XIII. 47. Erasistratus, De paralysia, II, as cited by Galen, De consuetudine, I, etc. 48. See Van Helmont, De ideis morbosis, De morbis archealibus, etc; Barthez, passim; Thomas Sydenham (Works, init.) defines illness as the method by which nature expels the harmful principle. This definition also implies the morbid idea; but



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it should be understood in concreto, ei]doj e1nulon; see Stahl, Van Helmont and Barthez on the effects of poisons, of contagious viruses and violent passions, which impress on the vital principle corresponding forms or morbid ideas. 49. Van Helmont, De morbis archealibus, p. 521, b. 50. Van Helmont, De morbis archealibus, p. 521, b, Burchart (supervised by Stahl), De haereditaria dispositione ad varios affectus (1706, in-4°); Jung, De consuetudinis efficacia, p. 13. 51. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 52. Claude Perrault, Des sens extérieurs (Œuvres, 1721, in-4°), p. 547: ‘Through the attention that it (the mind) has given to things in the first moments of life, it has acquired a perfect knowledge of their properties, and as a result of the prolonged use that it has made of them, it has become so inured to them that it no longer has any need to employ anything other than confused or lazy thoughts in relation to them’ (see also p. 569). 53. This is the spirit and the letter of Stahlianism, almost always misconceived and misunderstood by his adversaries, even by the wise and profound Barthez. See Stahl, passim, and principally Negotium otiosum; Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum de subtilitate adversus Cardanum, p. 987: Anima sibi fabricat dentes, cornua, ad vitam tuendam; iis utitur, et scit quo sit utendum modo, sine objecto aut phantasia ulla [‘Spirit makes teeth and horns for itself to preserve its own life; it uses them, in whatever manner they are used, without an object or any mental image’]. 54. Maine de Biran, loc. cit., p. 124: ‘Could one not conjecture that the repeated exercise of the same movements makes the parts themselves more mobile, more irritable, in converting them into artificial centres of forces, like vital organs, or those of cold-blooded animals, are their natural centres.’ 55. Johann Gottfried Herder, Idées sur la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité (1800), I, 143: ‘The crystal shoots with more promptitude and regularity than the bee constructs its comb, or the spider her web. In the stone it is only a blind, organic instinct, which is infallible.’ 56. Plotinus, Ennead, I, 6: Anabate&on ou]n pa&lin e0pi\ to_ a)gaqo_n pa~sa yuxh& … )Efeto_n me\n gar w(j a)gaqo_n, kai h{ e!fesij pro_j tou~to [‘It is thus necessary to climb up towards the Good, towards which souls are inclined … As Good, it is desired and desire inclines towards it’]. 57. Butler, Analogy of Religion; Stewart. 58. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 9; IX, 7. 59. Aristotle, Politics, VIII; Nicomachean Ethics, X, 10. 60. Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 9: Ou)de to_ logistiko_n kai o# kalou&menoj nou~j e0stin o# kinw~n. – !Eti kai\ e0pita&ttontoj tou~ nou~ kai legou&shj th=j dianoi/aj feu&gein ti h1 diw&kein, ou0 kinei=tai. Ibid., 10: O me\n nou~j ou) fai&netai kinw~n a1neu o0recewj [‘Further, neither can the calculative faculty or what is called “mind” be the cause of such movement; for mind as speculative never thinks what is practicable, it never says anything about an object to be avoided or pursued, while this movement is always in something which is avoiding or pursuing an

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object’; ibid., 10: ‘As it is, mind is never found producing movement without appetite’]. 61. François Fénelon, Traité de l’existence de Dieu, XCII; Saint Augustine, as cited by Fénelon, ibid.: Intimior intimo nostro [‘More intimate to us than we are to ourselves’]; Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, VII, 14: Kinei= ga_r pwj pa&nta to_ e0n h(mi=n qei=on. Lo&gou d’a0rxh\ ou) lo&goj a)lla_ ti krei=tton. Ti/ ou)n a1n krei=tton kai\ e0pisth&mhj ei1poi [RITTER: ei1h]], plh&n qeo_j [‘For in a sense the divine element in us is the cause of all our motions. And the starting-point of reason is not reason but something superior to reason. What, then, could be superior even to knowledge and to intellect, except God?’]; Vico, De l’antique sagesse de l’Italie (trad. Michelet), Ch. 6: ‘God is the first originator of all motions, whether of bodies or of spirits … Yet more, according to Holy Scripture, no one of us can go to the Father unless the same Father has drawn him.’ 62. On the habits of the mind, see particularly Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. 63. See above, II, I. 64. As Dugald Stewart supposes to be the case (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, II, 14ff.) against Reid. The same applies to Hume and Hartley: Hume, in supposing a sort of attraction between ideas; Hartley, by means of the no less arbitrary hypothesis concerning vibrations of the nerves. 65. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, VIII, 14: Ou) ga_r e0bouleu&sato bouleusa&menoj, kai tou~t’ e0bouleu&sato, a)ll/ e1stin a)rxh&, tij ou)d’ e0no&hse no&hsaj pro&teron noh=sai, kai tou=to ei0j a1peiron. Ou)k a1ra tou~ noh=sai o( nou=j a)rxh_, ou0de\ tou= bouleu&sastai boulh& [‘For it is not the case that one only deliberates when one has deliberated even previously to that deliberation, nor does one only think when one has previously thought before thinking, and so on to infinity, but there is some starting-point; therefore thought is not the starting-point of thinking, nor deliberation of deliberating’]. On this point, and on the character of nature, see the profound metaphysician Cesalpino, Quaestionum peripateticarum, II, 4. 66. On the opposition of circumscriptive knowledge and constitutive knowledge, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

2 Contemporary Philosophy Scottish philosophy held sway in France only within public education; and in this tranquil domain to which a general indifference increasingly abandoned it, it seems already, deserted by those who had previously supported it, to be languishing and wasting away. It is fading away in a soundless solitude. In Scotland, it barely survived its founders. It appeared to be reborn with the philosopher who succeeded Brown, their unfaithful disciple. William Hamilton’s Fragmens1 place him beside Reid and Dugald Stewart. Louis Peisse has recently translated his principal works, and he has also added a Preface that assigns to him, for his force of thought and brilliant style, a very distinguished place in contemporary philosophical literature. However, this publication, though attesting to the rare talent of its authors, hardly seems to provide reassurance concerning the Scottish school’s vitality. Far from it: it seems to present new symptoms of the sickness from which the school is suffering, significant proofs that the sickness is decidedly incurable, and the omen of its ultimate demise. Hamilton, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, is, in general, a faithful disciple of the Scottish doctrine, such as we find it in Reid’s writings in particular, and he has defended its principles with an equal force against Brown’s disguised scepticism, against the materialism of the phrenologists, and against what he calls the rationalism of Victor Cousin and F. W. J. Schelling. However, as we shall see, he differs from the classical version of the Scottish doctrine on an important point. In addition, he is a stranger in many ways, and by the very dispositions that are proper to him, to the habits and spirit of his masters. In his profound knowledge of the history of philosophy, of which he gives many proofs, in the high esteem in which he holds metaphysicians of all periods – not excepting the Scholastics – and, above all, in his fondness for Aristotelian logic, there is no trace of the manner or even the favourite opinions of Reid and Stewart; no trace, need it be said, of the characteristic antipathies of this school, which, though impartial in appearance, is at bottom rather exclusive. As for Peisse, although he appears to agree with his author on the essentials of the doctrine, and principally on the necessity of restraining the power of philosophy

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within narrow limits, he evidently feels even more uncomfortable within these limits. He remains there, as Cousin said of Hamilton, by scientific virtue, and he suffers from it and is almost indignant because of it. He complains about the humiliation of philosophy, today reduced to the condition of a narrow specialism, ‘whereas it stands, in fact, above and beyond all the particular sciences, whether speculative or practical, since its proper and superior function is to determine the principles, the conditions, and the possibility of all the applications of the human mind’; he sees in the much celebrated prudence of the Scottish only indecision. He shows much disdain for their pernickety procedures of description, enumeration and classification, and little confidence in the results they promise from them. He visibly regrets the regions that he believes are impossible to access via human reason, ‘but that an irresistible law requires it to search for while not allowing it to discover them’. It is not possible to speak more worthily of the supreme goal to which science aspires, but which in his eyes, unfortunately, is ‘similar to the fantastical Ithaca continuously receding into the shimmering depths of the horizon’. Hamilton surpasses his own system due to the scope of his science and his dialectic. Peisse struggles to accept the yoke of his system, and unsettles it with a singular impatience. These distinguished, eminent minds thus find themselves cramped within their own doctrine. At every moment, their inclinations and desires go beyond the circle in which they believe themselves to be necessary enclosed, and at the same time, they strive to demonstrate to themselves and to others that it is impossible to escape it. They demonstrate the circle by principles that seem incontestable to them. They succeed in showing how far below the ideal of philosophy – as the need and the hope of the human soul conceives it – their own doctrine remains. They convince the soul of its powerlessness, and it is this that is most apt to bring about its downfall. The consequence, better deduced than ever before, undermines the principle. It sheds a new light back onto it; it means that we have to search for, and perhaps that we will discover, the still hidden vice in it. When Bacon undertook to reform the sciences, at first he reduced every science strictly speaking to the knowledge of nature, and, at the same time, he proclaimed as a principle – as new as it was fecund – that science consists in the observation of facts, and in the induction which, by relating facts similar to each other, discovers their general laws. Newton fortified the commandment by the authority of his example. The Scottish doctrine is founded on the idea that it is necessary to extend Bacon’s theory, which relates to the sciences in general and to physics in particular, to philosophy. Everyone knows that appearances are distinguished from the principles that make them appear and in which they reside; that phenomena are distinguished from their causes and substances. It is also well known that science essentially consists in accounting for things by explaining them through their principles, and it has always been thought that all the sciences ultimately presuppose a superior



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science of first principles. It is this science that is called philosophy. According to the Scottish, philosophy must renounce the pretension of being the science of causes and substances. All we can know about reality is reduced to the facts or phenomena that we observe and to the consequences, which observation does not obtain, that we can draw from them. The facts are of two sorts: the first fall under the senses, these are external phenomena; the second are the object of inner sense alone, that is, internal, spiritual, psychological, phenomena. The former belong to the domain of physical or natural science, the latter to that of philosophical science. In both sciences, experience gathers the facts and induction discovers their laws. For both sciences, therefore, one and the same method is sufficient; the method of which Bacon prescribed the usage and determined (as they say) the veritable rules. These propositions fill the works of Reid and Dugald Stewart. Here, we will simply cite the testimony of their celebrated interpreter Jouffroy: ‘if the Scottish’, he says in the preface of his translation of Reid, ‘have provided a service, and a great service, to philosophy, this consists in having established once and for all, in such a way that it could never be forgotten, the idea that there is a science of observation, a science of facts, in the way that the physicists understand it, which has the human mind for its object and the inner sense for an instrument, and which results in the determination of the laws of the mind, as the physical sciences result in the determination of the laws of matter.’2 ‘What remains when we have read them, what arrests the mind, preoccupies and possesses it, is the idea that there is a science of the human mind, a science of facts, like the physical sciences, which, like them, must proceed by observation and induction.’3 Similarly, Royer-Collard said: ‘The observation of human nature, like that of the physical world, consists in surveying the facts. This is the first step in the study of man; the second consists in classifying the facts with regard to their similarities and their differences, etc.’4 And he too honours Bacon for the discovery of the method. Cousin is in perfect agreement with the Scottish school on all these points; he has the same opinions, uses the same language for the division of the physical and philosophical sciences and for the diversity and the similarity of their objects, and finally agrees on the (alleged) author of the true scientific method. ‘Here as elsewhere, as everywhere, as always’, he says in the preface to the second edition of his Fragmens, ‘I am in favour of the method that places the point of departure of any healthy philosophy in the study of human nature, and, consequently, in observation, and that directs itself to induction and reasoning in order to draw from observation all the consequences that it contains.’ And in his first preface: ‘We must borrow Bacon’s experimental method.’ However, Cousin remarks that Bacon was wrong to want to restrain the application of his method to the physical sciences, and thus adds: ‘Only the method of observation should be employed, but it should be applied to all the facts, whatever they may be, provided that they exist. Its exactness is therefore in its impartiality, and impartiality

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is found only in extension. Thus, perhaps, the long-sought alliance between the metaphysical and physical sciences would be formed, not by a systematic sacrifice of one to the other, but by the unity of their method applied to diverse phenomena.’ ‘Experience has the same conditions and the same rules, whatever the object to which it is applied may be.’ Physics, as can be seen, advances hand in hand with philosophy. – Furthermore, we could cite, among many similar passages, the parallel between the natural and the philosophical sciences with which the thirteenth of the 1829 lectures on modern philosophy begins. Finally, in an entirely favourable review of Stewart’s Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Cousin clearly proclaims his acquiescence to the principle of ‘this new school that claims to be the sole legitimate child of Bacon, and reclaims the so prodigious and poorly understood title of the experimental school’. Like Reid, like Stewart, like their French disciples, Hamilton is of the opinion that we must reduce philosophy to the observation of phenomena and to the generalization of these phenomena into laws.5 He repeats in several places that beings in themselves, like causes and substances, escape the sciences. However, we no longer see in his writings the parallel between philosophy and the physical sciences established everywhere by the school to which he belongs. It seems that in this regard doubts began to arise in his mind. Peisse, in the end, is of the opinion that we know the thinking being only by its phenomenal manifestations, and he strongly believes that ‘all that we can attempt to affirm of it, in these manifestations, is inevitably struck with contradiction and unintelligibility’. But he no longer expects anything of the Scottish method. He desires more and hopes less. Beyond the experience that makes facts known to us, and the induction that acquires their laws, the Scottish philosophers recognize in human intelligence truths that do not come from this source; these are the somehow innate principles, that we find in ourselves, and that enable us either to understand experience itself, or to advance beyond it, and even to transcend its limits. The principles that carry us entirely beyond experience are the primitive judgements, by virtue of which we assume, for all phenomena, beings that are their principles, causes and substances, and we rise thus from the visible world to an invisible world, which is its source. We might well wonder whether this second part of the Scottish doctrine is upheld by all of them in the same way as the first. Reid is very indebted, as Peisse has remarked, to a little-known author: Father Buffier. ‘I have found’, Reid himself said, ‘more original things in the Treatise on First Truths as the Source of our Judgments, than in most of the books on metaphysics that I have read. In general, Buffier’s judgements appear to me to be of perfect accuracy, and as for the small number of those of which I could not entirely approve, they are at least very ingenious.’ It is, it would seem, this French philosopher who provided the founder of the Scottish school with almost all of his theory of first truths.



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Whatever the case may be, the Scottish school properly speaking has never thought that the innate principles of human intelligence, which propel it beyond the circle of experience, could take us very far. Though recognizing that we are authorized to believe that there are substances and causes beyond phenomena and their laws, the Scottish philosophers think that we can know nothing of these beings except what induction authorizes us to conclude from the fact to the cause, from the mode to the substance, and they suppose that this amounts to very little. Stewart especially insists on the need to make philosophy return, like physics, into the sphere of questions of fact, and to forbid it metaphysical questions about the ground of the facts and the nature of things. This is quite simply, we must acknowledge, to banish from philosophy the very object of any philosophy worthy of the name. The French disciples of the Scottish school have never subscribed to this judgement. Jouffroy certainly does not hope that induction applied to philosophical questions will result in a particularly broad ensemble of results that would look anything like the bold systems of most metaphysicians. However, he professes the conviction ‘that it allow us to determine in a manner that is certain a small number of key points that are of the greatest importance for the happiness and hopes of humanity, and which would themselves suffice to make these enquiries worthy of the careful consideration of all the friends of science and raise it from the unjust contempt to which the Scottish assertion tends to condemn them’. As for Cousin, he refuses to admit any restrictions on the science of causes and substances, on the science of beings in themselves, or, if we please, on metaphysics. In order to understand and appreciate this fact, we must, with Hamilton and Cousin himself, indicate its origin. It lies no longer in the Scottish school; it lies in Germany. Like the founder of the Scottish school, but with a very different depth and genius, Kant believed he had established that human intelligence has for its object only phenomena and their laws. He demonstrated that if we conceive beyond appearances things that would serve as their ground, it is impossible to develop a science from these conceptions. Let us add that Kant’s demonstration does not in any way, whatever we might say, rest on this basis: that the judgements with which the human intellect goes beyond the givens of experience, there being nothing definitive except human judgements, can establish nothing about the reality of their objects, and that the necessity with which they impose themselves on us can in no way guarantee their absolute veracity. Kant’s demonstration is founded on a critique of allegedly transcendent ideas, a critique from which it results, he claims, that when applied to purely intelligible beings, they would be absolutely meaningless, and that, in contrast, they are meaningful only when applied to objects of experience as the rules that allow us to conceive them. From this it follows that they are solely ways of perceiving the phenomena: (transcendental) forms according to which the human intellect understands phenomena. Henceforth, the invisible world of beings is for knowledge (if

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not for belief, which comes from another source) only an insoluble problem, and metaphysics a chimera. Transcendental idealism had barely existed for any length of time before a philosophy was born from its own womb, a philosophy more daring perhaps than any of the old theories, and which, going beyond the limits that transcendental idealism believed it had set for all time, claimed to recover, beyond phenomena, not only beings – things in themselves – but the absolute principle of all existence. The aim had been to exclude knowledge from realities: now it claimed to have access to them, not by reasoning, but by an immediate vision, by a direct intuition of the intellect in possession of the absolute. This was Fichte’s philosophy, this was above all Schelling’s philosophy, in its first form, the Philosophy of Nature. Cousin has told of how, in 1817, when his method, his direction, his general views were already formed, he became aware of the philosophy of nature in Germany. He admired its grandeur. Cousin himself has a grand imagination; he likes high peaks, vast horizons; he wanted to encompass the whole range of German speculations within his own system. But, steeped in the principles of the philosophy of observation, he hoped that they would be sufficient for this enterprise. Schelling’s doctrine seemed to him to be a sublime hypothesis that required proof. In the end, it appeared to him as truth itself, but it lacked the method to become science; and it is in the combination of speculation with the method of experience that he wanted the distinctive character and the proper merit of his philosophy to consist. Thus Cousin declares that in pushing back the limits within which the Scottish philosophy believed it had to contain human intelligence, he has no intention of being unfaithful to the principles of this philosophy. He has not stopped believing with it that the starting point is the observation and analysis of facts. He thought only that it imposes on reasoning arbitrary limits, on reasoning, that is, above all on induction, for, as he says, ‘it is induction that brings to the facts the consequences that they enclose within themselves’; and he overtly aspires to a transcendent metaphysics, to an ontology. This trait alone separates him from the psychologists of the Scottish school: he sets the goal higher, and he has a greater confidence in the means to attain it, an absolute confidence without limits. He names the only philosophical method ‘this method of observation and induction that has raised so high and carried so far all the physical sciences, resting only on human nature, but which embraces it entirely, and with it attains the infinite’.6 The infinite, the absolute is the terminus to which Bacon’s method, properly understood, must lead metaphysics. Now, both German philosophy and Scottish philosophy contest the illustrious French philosopher on this point, as but a pretension unfounded by right, unjustified by fact. The former approves of the end but disapproves of the means;7 the latter holds the end to be chimerical and regards the procedure with which Cousin wants to attain it as a false application of a true method.



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In one of the four opuscules that Peisse has translated, Hamilton attacks at once the pretensions of Schelling and Cousin to offer a science of the absolute. We have noted that Schelling believed he had discovered the first and absolute principle of everything through the direct and immediate vision of the intellect. This intellectual intuition (an expression borrowed from Kant by Fichte) would be the act in which thought, the principle of science, is recognized as being absolutely identical to existence. The subject of knowledge and its object are no longer distinguished, but should be brought together and definitively combined in an indivisible unity. Hamilton rejected this sublime mode of knowledge; but he admitted with Schelling, and argued against Cousin, that if it were possible to know in itself the absolute principle of things, it would at least not be possible under the conditions of diversity and division from which ordinary knowledge is inseparable. Cousin admits with the modern German metaphysicians that what is relative and limited could not be the ultimate and true object of philosophy. He believes that limits and relations of any kind demand in the final analysis an absolute and infinite principle: the absolute, the infinite itself. But whereas the German metaphysicians think that this absolute is accessible only to a superior mode of knowledge – if not a mode superior to all consciousness, as they have frequently said, then at least one superior to the conditions of ordinary human consciousness – Cousin is confident that he can find it by observation and induction within consciousness. He believes that consciousness is necessarily subject to the condition of the opposition between the subject that knows and the object known, of the diversity of the object itself, and in general to the law of limitation and of relativity. Furthermore, he denies that the divine intellect overcomes this law. ‘We could not’, says Hamilton, ‘desire a more complete confession, not only that knowledge of the absolute is impossible for man, but also that we could not even conceive its possibility, even in God, without contradicting our human conception of the very possibility of the intellect. Our author, however, perceives here no contradiction, and, without proof or explanation, accords knowledge of what cannot be known except under the negation of all difference and plurality to what cannot be known without affirming these two things. It is only by ignoring the radical difficulties of the problem that Cousin seeks to abandon intellectual intuition while conserving the absolute. Indeed, how could that whose essence is a unity that embraces everything be known by the negation of this unity under the condition of plurality? How could what exists only as the identity of all difference be known by the negation of this identity, in the antithesis of the subject and object, of knowledge and existence? These are the contradictions that Cousin has not attempted to resolve.’ Perhaps it would not be impossible to show that in the arguments presented with such skill by Hamilton, against Schelling’s doctrine or that of Cousin, there is more appearance than substance. His argumentation amounts to saying that the science of the absolute, according to Schelling, is in contradiction with the nature of all science,

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and the science of the absolute, according to Cousin, is in contradiction with the nature of the absolute, such as Cousin defines it himself; and this according to the principle that knowledge always implies some diversity, and the absolute, contrarily, always implies perfect unity. Perhaps there is a method by which we could give a true sense to the two doctrines, by resolving their apparent contradictions, and uniting them in one and the same profound truth. What would be strange about conceiving as the final term of science an extremity where diversity, the opposition that is the law of its development, would come by degrees to vanish? What would be so absurd about thinking that absolute knowledge is in some way (like in mathematics) the limit where the common measure and the ultimate ground of contraries is to be found, not the link where they merge, but the terminus where negation and limitation disappear, defeated, in the identity of the principle? An ingenious and penetrating author has said of one of these mixtures of contraries that are so often encountered in the conduct of life, and that are so difficult to express: ‘that seems gibberish; but this gibberish is of the kind that practice sometimes allows us to know, and that speculation never allows us to understand. I have noticed gibberish of this kind in all sorts of affairs.’ Perhaps speculation will not always be unable to make intelligible, even if it will never be able to make us fully understand it, this mysterious unity of differences that is the secret of knowledge no less than of life. But I doubt that the key to this enigma could ever be found in the Scottish doctrine, and Hamilton seems to have demonstrated that to be consistent with these principles, if not faithful to the promises of his own philosophy, Cousin must renounce, like him, the pursuit of the absolute. In his later writings, Cousin, has appeared to abandon both the word, and, up to a certain point, the thing itself. He hardly says anything about the knowledge of the absolute as the first and unique principle of all things, and speaks only of the knowledge of beings in themselves, as opposed to phenomena, of causes, substances, real existences. In his excellent preface, Peisse follows Cousin into this terrain, whereas Hamilton argued only about the absolute, the infinite, and the unconditioned, rigorously understood in the most abstract and elevated sense. In the foreword that precedes the final edition of his Fragmens philosophiques (1838), Cousin addresses Hamilton: ‘You resign yourself ’, he says with his usual verve, ‘to passing over Ontology. You urge me to do the same, and to ignore what is not given for man to know. What does that mean? Let us not be afraid of words. Ontology is no less than the science of being, and that is to say, in truth, of beings, that is, of God, the world, and man. This is what you suggest I ignore because of methodological scruples! But if your science attains not nature, nor God, nor myself, what can it teach me that is important?’8 – ‘We do not deny’, replies Peisse, in Hamilton’s and his own name, ‘that our science does not attain God, nature, and ourselves; we only discuss the nature, content, and form of this science. For us, our knowledge of beings is purely indirect, finite, relative; it does not reach beings



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themselves in their reality and absolute essence, but only their accidents, modes, relations, limitations, differences, qualities. – According to us, the whole science of beings is reduced to knowing that they are; – according to our adversaries, we can know not only that they are, but what they are.’ The idea that we can know nothing of beings in themselves except that they exist is, as we said above, the Scottish doctrine in its purity; the doctrine of Reid, and above all of Stewart, it was also Buffier’s. ‘Man’, says the latter, ‘is forced by his reason to admit the existence of something that he does not understand.’ About divine nature, for example, ‘he understands that it is, and not what it is’. If we allow ourselves here to employ the terminology of the Scholastics, we would say, according to Buffier, according to the Scottish, according to Hamilton and Peisse, that we know only the quod and not the quid of beings. It will be remarked, however, and this Peisse will assuredly admit (again with Buffier), that we cannot know the existence of a thing without having beforehand or at the same time some knowledge of its nature or essence; for, in order to affirm that a being exists, it is necessary to know that it is a being, and, if we affirm the existence of a being of a certain kind, what this kind is. Yet it is not unreasonable to hold that we have only a general and undetermined notion of the essence of beings, and only an external and logical conception of their relations with phenomena. Now, to what degree is induction authorized to fill the void of these abstract determinations, in transporting to the invisible world, to which they introduce us, the characteristics of this visible world of which it is the ground? This is the question; inductive knowledge is always a matter of a more or less; for if we agree with the principle that experience divulges phenomena alone, and if we add only that reason (or common sense) reveals to us that these phenomena suppose substances and causes, we also have to admit that reason tells us nothing other than that these substances and causes exist, and not what they are in themselves. It teaches us (at most) their existence and their general relation with phenomena, but not their intimate nature, and that consequently, in the end, only induction could teach us something more. What can it teach us? Here Cousin appears to have counted more than the Scottish on induction’s resources; but it does not actually seem to have given him anything more. His system is vast according to its contours and general lines, and it abounds in elevated views; but the dogmatic propositions with which he has summarized his doctrine concerning the nature of God, the soul, and matter – concerning the essence of beings and their internal relations – do not at all exceed the limitations of the Scottish speculations. We find there nothing similar to the theories that constitute the grounds of modern German metaphysics. Such is at least Schelling’s opinion. In a deliberate judgement on Cousin’s philosophy, he said: ‘Cousin’s metaphysics does not at all differ from that which preceded Kant, insofar as it is based uniquely on the syllogism, and above all insofar as it is content with the that without struggling for the how (for example, that God is the supreme

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cause of the world). It is very far from being a science of things in themselves (realphilosophie), like the philosophy to which the modern systems aspire. Not only does he fail to admit an objective science without a psychological base, but it is true to say that he does not admit any, and does not arrive at one in any way at all. Following him, we attain the supreme summit of metaphysics by the necessity that reason imposes on consciousness to raise itself above limited causes (I and not-I) – which, insofar as they are limited, are not causes – up to the unlimited cause, to the cause properly so called, to the true cause, which gives being to the former, and which maintains them. Everything is limited to these generalities, which, as everyone sees, do not promise in the least a genuine science.’9 Is it just that in using the method of induction, we have not yet drawn from it everything that it has to offer, and can we still base infinite hopes upon it? The phenomena, from which we want to climb up to beings, doubtless represent to us these beings, but not in what is proper to them and in their specific character. The effects doubtless represent the cause, and the modes represent the substance; but far from representing their ground, they hide it from us. ‘These relative accidents’, Peisse says appropriately, ‘far from realising the absolute notion of the object, destroy it or rather impede it.’ Nature, as has been said in just as strong a sense, shows God to us, but at the same time conceals him. Furthermore, everyone agrees that from induction founded on resemblances that can be deceptive, we will only obtain results that are more or less similar; it generates only presumptions. Thus a philosophy supported on Scottish principles could never claim to attribute to beings, beyond simple existence, anything more than very limited presumptions. Is it true that it attains at least the existence of beings? If we deny it the quid of substances, is it too much to allow it the quod? After having reduced every philosophy taking up the principles of the Scottish school to what this school itself demands, it is necessary, it seems, to go further; it is necessary to establish that the demand is still excessive and unjustified. We are informed that the vision of phenomena is only the occasion or the circumstance that leads reason to discover for us the existence of certain realities that phenomena suppose; that in the case of the perception of a change, on the occasion of a quality it reveals to us from itself the cause and substance. The imprecision of the expression seems to be the result of the insufficiency of the idea; under the words, we feel a void, a lacuna that they struggle to hide. Why does reason pass from a phenomenon to the affirmation of a being? How can a pure mode become the occasion suggesting the idea of the necessity of substance? How, concerning an event, does reason ascend to the cause? How, finally, is the phenomenon the circumstance that leads reason to conceive it as an effect and attribute? The Scottish saw here a fact that did not demand, which could not bear, explanation. It is, in the language of Reid, the effect of a certain faculty of inspiration and suggestion; according to Cousin, a revelation of reason. Is it therefore, Schelling asks, the mysterious result of a kind



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of occult quality of intelligence? But, if it is, human reason is justified only by blind instincts, and Hume’s scepticism has won the day. One of the Scottish philosophers called their first truths legitimate prejudices. Is this not the true name, and are we not obliged to agree that this philosophy can indeed lead to nothing in the knowledge of beings except presumptions built on prejudices? In Kant’s philosophy matters are quite different. First, experience is not merely an occasion for the conception of the principles that exceed it, but these principles are rather the indispensable condition and in some way an integral element of experience itself.10 In this way, human intelligence is no longer composed of two detached and distinct faculties, but, according to Jacobi’s expression, a whole of only one piece, or at least an organic ensemble. In second place, transcendental idealism does not leave these principles, which it makes the basis and law of experience, without explanation. Why is it, Kant asks, that in certain judgements (for example: every event has a cause) that the intellect adds to a given of experience (the event) something (the cause) that is not logically contained in it? What is the unknown principle (x) that causes it to unite to the notion a, without prior experience, a foreign notion b? How can it, in short, assert synthetic a priori judgements? This is, according to him, the very question of the possibility of metaphysics, and philosophy’s fate is attached to it. Here, where there is no problem at all for the Scottish philosopher, the author of the critical philosophy has unravelled the fundamental problem of all rational science. Which of the two systems is true? Is it necessary, with the Scottish school and the schools deriving from it, to recognize in the necessary principles of reason primitive beliefs, inexplicable revelations of a mysterious instinct, or must we, with Kant, seek their justification? We have noted that in order to believe that a thing exists, it is already necessary to know in a general manner what it is. The belief cannot be anterior to some form of knowledge. This entails that, for reason to affirm the existence of an invisible being outside and beyond all phenomena, it is not sufficient that knowledge of a phenomenon furnishes the occasion. It is necessary that it have, beyond that, some knowledge of the object of its belief. Whence can this knowledge be drawn if phenomena are the only objects of direct knowledge, and if there is no other vision than the vision of facts? Whence, in which reality, could it draw the idea on which its faith is borne, and from what sort of intuition could this idea come to it? In Kant’s system, there is an intermediary on which the intellect relies in order to link the two heterogeneous terms, the object of observation and the object of conception, in its synthetic a priori judgements. – We cannot, says the author of the Critique of Pure Reason, perceive phenomena except as succeeding each other in time: time is not a simple conception like general ideas; it is something like the one place in which all facts are necessarily situated. It is an intuition or an a priori

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imagination.11 Now, the phenomena are in time as a succession in an immutable duration. Such is the basis of the judgements affirming causes and substances a priori. Every phenomenon has a determined place in time, and it is through the past that the present is determined when it arrives. Therefore, there must be something in the past that causes the present phenomenon to exist at the place it occupies; this rule is the idea of cause. Secondly, since every phenomenon is a transient apparition in the duration of time, in order to conceive it we must oppose it to something durable, in which everything changes and which itself does not change; this rule is the idea of substance. Thus, a cause is only the expression of relations between phenomena in time; a substance, the expression of their relation with time, with duration itself. Cause is the representation of the order of time; substance is the representation of its quantity; these are merely the figures (or schema) of the necessary rules of experience. Time, in Kant’s doctrine, is not a thing subsisting in itself, but only a way, the only one possible, of imagining the facts, and, consequently, a simple form of our intellect. Cause and substance are therefore only the symbolic realizations of the conditions of the human intellect. When we affirm that every phenomenon has a cause, and occurs in a substance, we only enunciate the rules that are indispensable for our mind in order to represent any phenomenon; the idea of time is the middle term by which we pass from phenomena to intelligibles (or noumena), for the very simple reason that time is the necessary form of the imagination of phenomena, and that the intelligible is the realized image of this form. This is how the synthetic a priori judgement is explained. The reality of the intelligible vanishes, it vanishes in an illusion; but at least the idea and the judgement that posits it have received a rational justification. In Kant’s system, being is the deceptive image of the empty form that we call Time, and it is the dream of the intellect that takes this nothing for a thing. In the Scottish philosophy, the phantom itself is chimerical and the dream impossible. Indeed, for it, there is no link between the world of phenomena and the intelligible world; reason passes from the first to the second without support, without an intermediary, and its judgement heads off into the void. Not only does it not justify the reality of the objects of its necessary ideas, but it does not even justify the possibility of the idea, it does not grant any meaning to it; in truth, it allows us to doubt whether it is indeed an idea or just a fruitless word. By selecting its starting point in the observation of phenomena, science does not, therefore, go any further; at most, it raises particular facts to the general expression of the same facts, and yet it has often been shown that even the most limited generalization cannot find adequate justification in the pure and simple experience of facts. But, in any case, substances and causes, beings, real existences are forbidden to it; they must remain in an apparent world without ground and without reason.



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Is there no means of escape from such a conclusion? It arises from a principle that is held to be certain. What if this principle were but a false supposition, a misleading prejudice? * The principle of Scottish philosophy is that of every English philosophy since Bacon. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Reid agree on this fundamental point, that no experience has either causes or substances for its object, but phenomena uniquely. In the history of science, and of the science among us in our own country, there is a contrary principle, as fecund as the principle of Scottish and English philosophy appeared sterile. The English philosophy was imported and seemed to be naturalized in France; dropped into the country of Descartes and Malebranche, after having produced materialism, its natural fruit, the thought of Bacon and Locke secretly metamorphosed, like a plant that changes nature when it changes climate. French philosophy has risen, by a sequence of degrees that we will try to mark, from the point of view of matter to the point of view of mind Locke reduced the sources of human knowledge to two: [1] sensation, which furnishes the ideas of external phenomena; [2] reflection, by which the soul becomes aware of its own operations on the ideas that it acquires through the senses. Condillac, as is known, reduced the two acts identified by Locke to one faculty alone. According to him, man exists entirely in sensation. Sensation is a manner of being of the one who experiences it, a mode of his faculty of knowing. Condillac begins the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, his first work, with these words: ‘whether we raise ourselves, to speak metaphorically, into the heavens or descend into the abyss, we never go beyond ourselves, and we never perceive anything but our own thought.’12 There was only one step from here to the extremes to which Hume pushes Locke’s theory; for, if nothing is known except for sensations, it is impossible to draw from these phenomena the reality of an object that they represent. It is no less impossible to draw from them the reality of the subject that experiences them. But on the slope of this idealism, Condillac soon encountered a resistance; sensation itself taught him a reality that an increasingly profound reflection finds increasingly rebellious to idealization. ‘On the one hand,’ he says in the précis of the second edition of the Treatise on Sensations’, ‘all of our knowledge comes from the senses; on the other, our sensations are only our ways of being. How, therefore, can we see objects outside of us? Indeed, it seems that we must see only our soul modified differently …’ ‘I agree that this problem was poorly resolved in the first edition of the Treatise on Sensations … We have proven that with the sensations of smell, hearing, taste and sight, man would believe himself to be smell, sound, taste, colour, and that he

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would have no knowledge of external objects. – It is equally certain that with the sense of touch he would be just as ignorant if he remained immobile … Three things are necessary for this man to make the judgement that there are bodies: first, that his limbs are determined to move themselves; second, that his hand, the principal organ of touch, moves itself around its own body and those bodies that surround it; and, finally, that, among the sensations that the hand experiences, there is one that necessarily represents bodies …. Consequently, either touch provides no knowledge of bodies, or among the sensations that we owe to it there is one not perceived as a way of being of ourselves, but rather as the way of being of a continuum formed by the contiguity of other continua (that is, of an extension). We are necessarily forced to judge this sensation itself as extended.’ ‘This sensation’, he adds in the second edition of the Treatise on Sensations, ‘is that from which we infer that bodies are impenetrable, namely the sensation of solidity or of resistance.’ – ‘Therefore, it is not the same with the sensation of solidity as it is with the sensations of sound, colour and smell that the soul – which does not know its body – perceives naturally as modifications of itself and itself alone. Since the sensation is supposed to represent at one and the same time two mutually exclusive things, the soul will not perceive solidity as one of these modifications in which it finds only itself; it will necessarily perceive it as a modification containing two mutually exclusive things, and, consequently, it will perceive it in these two things. There is, therefore, a sensation by which the soul moves beyond itself, and we thus begin to understand how it will discover bodies.’13 Condillac finds the external world to be revealed in the resistance of our own body to the involuntary and unreflective movement of the hand; it is easy to feel how rough and imperfect this first analysis is. The disciple and successor of Condillac goes further still. How would I know, says Destutt de Tracy in the Ideologie, that the movement of my hand has been suspended? It must be that I know this movement, and, in order to apprehend that it stops, that I know what it is. A special sensation is required that teaches it to me. – Thus, from the external resistance at which Condillac had stopped, reflection already returns to an internal feeling of movement. But is that sufficient? My arm encounters a body that stops it, my sensation of movement ceases, I am no longer experiencing this way of being. I am informed of it, it is true; but not knowing that there are bodies, I still know nothing of the cause of this effect. ‘At least, it is not proven that I am necessarily led, by this change in way of being, to recognise that what causes the cessation of my sensation of movement is a being external to my I. I formerly thought that was so, but I believe that I went too far. In order to make this discovery inevitable, therefore, we need to call to our aid another one of our faculties, and it is the faculty of will; once we introduce that faculty nothing will be hidden from us anymore, for, when I move myself, I perceive a sensation, if my movement is stopped, if my sensation ceases, my desire continues



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to subsist. I cannot ignore that it is not then an effect of my sensitive faculty [vertu sentante] alone; that would imply contradiction, since my sensitive faculty desires, with all the energy in its power, the prolongation of the sensation which ceases.’14 ‘In a word,’ says Destutt de Tracy, resuming these developments in the précis of the Ideologie, ‘when a being, organised in such a way as to feel and to act, senses within itself will and action and at the same time a resistance to this willed and felt action, it is assured of its existence and of the existence of something that it is not. Willed and felt action, on the one hand, and resistance on the other, this is the link between our I and other beings, between the feeling beings and the beings felt.’ In these naïve descriptions, it is interesting, I think, to attend to the progress of psychological reflection, which, from the observation of sensations, from this external and superficial view, draws back step by step into the depth of the subject. Having arrived at this point, de Tracy could not but soon realize that if the external world makes itself known as such only by its resistance to the will, the will is the natural revelation of the inner world, and that knowledge of the subject is intimately linked to knowledge of the object. In the Ideologie, he still admits that we can arrive at knowledge of ourselves without voluntary movement and by sensation alone: ‘For as long as we only feel sensations, we are assured only of our own existence.’ In a chapter of the same work (Chapter XIII, p. 169), and in the précis, he begins to remark that ‘we confuse our I more with the faculty of willing than with any other, since we say indifferently: that depends on the I or that depends on my will.’ In the Treatise on the Will and its Effects, it no longer seems likely to him that sensibility properly speaking could suffice in order for us to know in ourselves our I, our personality, and yet he admits that the I, in sensibility, knowing at most only itself, does not know itself by its opposition to other beings. He admits that it would be for itself the infinite or indefinite, but not an individuality and a distinct personality; thus ‘it is really in this mode of sensibility that we call will’ that the I is manifest. It is in the faculty of will that the ideas of personality and propriety are born. By a bizarre confusion of language, de Tracy, with his teacher Condillac, still calls the will a mode of sensibility; action is still found to be a mode of passion. But even if the words remain the same, things have indeed changed. Activity has become the basis of personal existence and even the principle of social life: the Treatise on the Will and its Effects is a treatise of political economy. It was reserved for a disciple of Destutt de Tracy to free the new theory from sensualism, and to raise it, above the ruins of the false philosophy in which it was born, to the rank of first principle. This reformer of philosophy in France was Maine de Biran. Maine de Biran begins15 by profoundly separating activity from the passivity with which Condillac had confused it under the common name of sensation. Sensation, properly speaking, is a completely passive affection; the being wholly reduced to it would be wholly lost, absorbed in all its modifications; it would successively become

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each of them, would not discover itself, would not distinguish itself, and would never know itself. Far from knowledge consisting in it alone, sensation, by merging with knowledge, troubles and obscures it, and knowledge, in turn, eclipses sensation. From this follows the law that Hamilton has emphasized in his remarkable article on the theory of perception: sensation and perception, although inseparable, are inversely related to each other. Maine de Biran had discovered this fundamental law thirty years beforehand, and had pursued all of its applications; he had above all further developed its principle, recognizing that sensation results from passion, and that perception results from action. Now, where is the knowledge of action born? Maine de Biran responds, like Destutt de Tracy, and like Stahl before him: in voluntary movement. In the end, the consciousness of our voluntary movement exists only in the consciousness of an effort, by which we overcome resistance in order to produce movement. In consciousness, like in external nature, action implies reaction. The reaction opposed to us is revealed to us by a sensation. The action reveals itself in the actual and immediate consciousness of our motor will. The consciousness of this motor will is not a composite of two facts, on the one side, movement, on the other, the will that produced it. Movement is not given to us as detached from the act that produced it, and the act of the will is not known to us outside of this actual movement in which it is realized. ‘We thus see clearly here’, says Maine de Biran, ‘that there are not two facts, two specifically different modes, in accidental connection, but one fact alone, one and the same active mode, relative by its nature, in such a way that one of its two constitutive elements cannot be isolated without annihilating or destroying it.’16 – ‘Willed effort [effort voulu] is a single fact composed of two elements, a single relation of two terms, of which one cannot be isolated from the other without changing its nature, and without passing from the concrete to the abstract.’17 Thus, consciousness of motor activity is the immediate knowledge of a cause, a cause bound in an indivisible fact to its effect. It is not the abstract knowledge of a mere capacity, of a cause separate from its effect, but indeed of an acting cause and in its real efficacy. This cause is myself, I, manifesting myself in an external sign in contrast to the not I on which I impress it. The efficacious cause is not simply the object of my consciousness, it is the knowing subject, and, it is true to say, consciousness itself. The Scottish school in general separates consciousness from the perception of external phenomena, and defines it as the knowledge of internal phenomena or modifications of the I. This is the capital point on which Hamilton distances himself from it. He noticed well that it thus takes a logical distinction for a real difference, and that inner sense, taken as a detached faculty, exists only as an idea. ‘The subject and the object’, he says astutely, ‘are known to us only in their correlation and their opposition. Any conception of the I necessarily implies a conception of



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the not-I; any perception of that which is different from me implies knowledge of the perceiving subject as distinct from the object perceived. In such an act of knowledge, it is true, the object is the predominant element; in another, it is the subject; but it does not happen that the one is known outside of its relation with the other.’ Thus subjective internal phenomena, isolated from any objective element (at least imagined), are pure abstractions, entirely hollow and vain, in which there is nothing real. Aristotle, Stahl, Kant, have successively established that there is no distinct thought without some image represented as extended. They can, therefore, give a true sense to this proposition of Bacon: Mens humana si agat in materiam, naturam rerum et opera Dei contemplando, pro modo materiae operatur atque ab cadem determinatur; si ipsa in se vertatur, tanquam aranea texens telam, tunc demum indeterminata est, et parit telas quasdam doctrinae, tenuitate fili operisque mirabiles, sed quoad usum frivolas et inanes.18 Condemned by the Scottish, this proposition, on the contrary, condemns their abstract psychology. Thus, instead of honouring Bacon for the invention, despite himself, of a method with an equal and parallel application to internal and external phenomena, we must place his glory as a philosopher where he wanted it to be placed, in the condemnation of what might be called the abstract phenomenology of inner sense. But, on the other hand, is it true, as Hamilton believes, that there is no solid distinction to be made between the perception of external objects and the consciousness of that which is in us, and that for the word ‘perception’ we could indifferently substitute ‘consciousness’? Locke had judiciously distinguished what he calls reflection from the knowledge of objects (which he called sensation). He had seen well that reflection is not a faculty of knowing existing on its own, with separate objects: he had defined it as the knowledge that the soul acquires of its own operations on its perceptions. But he had no less distinguished it from perception as an original element. We must not separate what is bound together in a living unity, but it is necessary to distinguish at the very heart of this unity that which is distinct. Complete knowledge, human knowledge is not at all simple perception applied to the external object, as it is in the animal; it is reflective perception, Leibniz’s apperception: apperceptio est perceptio cum reflexione conjuncte.19 What is the reflective element in consciousness or apperception? It is the I, it is myself. Without the I, there is no consciousness, for to have consciousness, the word says it itself, is to know with oneself, in oneself. But the I is action, energy. Thus, not only does consciousness imply the actual perception of some external object, but it implies, or rather it is essentially the actual feeling of activity, its own subject; internal phenomena – considered in themselves, separately and outside of personal activity – are not at all, whatever the sensualist or the Scottish school may say, the subjective phenomena of the consciousness of the I. This is what Maine de Biran has superbly

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established. Furthermore, if it is true that the not-I is possible only in opposition to the I, it follows that phenomena considered outside of personal activity do not express the not-I any more than the I. And consequently the Scottish psychology, including Hamilton’s, moves in a sphere of abstractions, where there is no more matter than spirit, no more body than soul, in a realm of shadows, in a region of the void, Quo neque permanent animae neque corpora nostra, Sed quaedam simulacra modis pallentia miris.20

As long as we consider internal phenomena in themselves and as simple objects of observation, as long as we consider them from the objective point of view, and as somehow belonging to the outside – like Condillac and Bonnet, the modifications of their animated statue – it is a science of forms and empty spaces, a hollow logic; it is not the living science of the subject of thought, a subjective science (in the profound sense of this word), the science of mind. Whereas the science of the external world has for its immediate object only phenomena, the experience of consciousness – apperception – is the experience of a cause. The physicist or naturalist sees before him a changing world of diverse appearances that he subsumes by degrees to general laws. The philosopher feels in himself, sees within an inner vision the principle of his science; he himself is the principle, himself the law and the immediate cause of what goes on within him. To abstract from the cause, is, as we must say with Maine de Biran, ‘to pervert or destroy the whole science of inner man’. How, therefore, are we not to reject, like him, ‘the imprudent application of Bacon’s method to the science of the faculties or facts of the human soul’? How are we to avoid seeing in this, as he has, the most disastrous error for philosophy? And what becomes of the fundamental axiom of the school that has honoured itself with the title of daughter of Bacon? This is no longer anything except the primum falsum that must result in its downfall. It was the error of seventeenth-century philosophy to want to assimilate itself to mathematics and to treat itself by the latter’s method. This was also the error of the English school of the eighteenth century, and the error of the Scottish school is, above all, to assimilate philosophy to physics, and to submit it with all required force to the yoke of the natural method. Philosophy is neither a science founded on definitions like mathematics, nor a superficial phenomenology like experimental physics. It is the science par excellence of causes and the spirit of all things, because it is above all the science of inner Mind in its living Causality. It takes up the perspective of subjective reflection indicated by Descartes, but he had left it floating in the poorly defined sphere of thought in general. It was, in general, better determined by Leibniz, and has now been established, by means of an original development of French philosophy, at the centre of spiritual life, in the inner experience of voluntary activity.



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Descartes sought something solid (aliquid inconcussum) on which he could base the edifice of his philosophy. This base has been found. We have seen Kant pose the problem of the possibility of metaphysics: what is the ground, that is to say, what is the middle term of the judgements by which the intellect infers a priori from phenomena to their principles? The Scottish school cannot resolve this problem and ignores its existence. Kant resolves it by idealism. For him, the middle term of his synthetic a priori judgements, the middle term between phenomena and beings, is a pure law and form of the imagination, and being is, consequently, an imaginary thing. But now consciousness has discovered, under all the forms and abstract laws of knowledge, a real principle that unites the two distinct worlds of phenomena and beings. In this, reason will find not only the explanation of its concepts, but also justification for its beliefs. The proof of this assertion would exceed the limits that we have traced; we will content ourselves to speak with Maine de Biran, and we will leave the attempt to prove it for another work: ‘Reason is indeed a faculty innate to the human mind, constitutive of its essence; we could say that it is the faculty of the absolute, but this faculty does not operate on its own nor in a vacuum; it does not grasp its object without an intermediary: this essential intermediary, this antecedent of reason, is the primitive I. – Both knowledge and belief have their ground and necessary support in the consciousness of the I or of the causal activity that constitutes it.’21 It seems that Kant himself had sensed this profound doctrine beneath his idealism. After having destroyed the pretensions of an abstract dialectic to the knowledge of reality, he sought a new foundation for this knowledge in the idea of moral liberty. He accorded to practical reason what he had refused to speculative reason. We have frequently seen in this distinction only a contradiction, but it was the incomplete expression of a profound, henceforth imperishable truth. Kant’s disciple Fichte, in the final formulation of his often poorly understood philosophy, meets with Maine de Biran. In his 1813 lectures on the Facts of Consciousness, we read these very words: ‘The middle term between experience and the superior sphere of knowledge is found in the will’s intuition of itself. It is in this intuition that the I passes from one region to another.’22 Today after having traversed new periods of naturalism and abstract idealism, German philosophy has found itself strengthened, enlarged, with its perspective on living reality and spiritual energy. Schelling finds in action, in personality, in freedom, the base of any future metaphysics. France and Germany, by such different routes, have encountered each other again, and the country of Descartes seems near to uniting itself in thought, dare I say in heart and soul, with the country of Leibniz. In France, Maine de Biran’s doctrine has already penetrated the Scottish doctrines up to a certain point, but it has been more or less modified in its principle and restrained in its consequences.

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In the remaining fragments of Royer-Collard’s teaching, we see him reluctantly accept Maine de Biran’s theory regarding the origin of the notion of cause, and regarding the primitive judgement that transports to all external causes the characteristics that personality finds within itself. But Royer-Collard remained no less firmly attached to Reid’s method. Cousin declares that he adopts Maine de Biran’s doctrine on the identity of the I or the personality with the will, and on the origin of the idea of cause. But at the same time, it seems to me, he distorts and annuls it by the restrictions that he imposes on it. At first, he refused to admit that effort is the unique source where the human will can acquire the first knowledge of itself. He posits an organism with nothing more than nerves, devoid of organs of movement, and affirms that the will is still produced and recognized in it: a hypothesis that Maine de Biran had already suggested and refuted in advance. The I is originally revealed to itself only in contrast to what it is not. The I recognizes this not-I only in the resistance that it encounters. It is thus, as Cousin himself said somewhere, ‘that the mind is given to us with its contrary, the outside with the inside, nature with man’. Take away the conditions of movement, and by consequence movement, and there is no resistance, no not-I, no I, and consciousness of the will is impossible. – In second place, Cousin himself refused to admit that the intellect conceives any cause as modelled on the I, that is to say as an intelligent and free force, and, in a word, as a mind. Here Cousin does not depart solely from the opinion of Maine de Biran and Royer-Collard, as he appears to recognize, but he also formally departs from the Scottish doctrine. Reid pronounces without hesitating, and he proves, as it seems to me, that we have no idea of an intellectual power differing in nature from the one we possess, and that it is the same with active power. ‘If, therefore,’ he adds, ‘someone affirms that a being can be the efficient cause of an action and have the power to produce it, although he can neither conceive nor will it, he speaks a language that I do not understand.’23 Whatever restrictions Cousin believes should still be placed on Maine de Biran’s fundamental principle, it seems that after a few years a new study of the doctrines of the great philosopher had led him to recognize one of their most important consequences. In the preface that he wrote to his edition of Maine de Biran’s works, he seems disposed to admit that, since philosophy has for its starting point immediate knowledge of a cause, Bacon’s method cannot be applied to it, and, therefore, he seems ready to abandon the flag of the Scottish school. In the last of his works, Jouffroy, the penetrating interpreter of this school, agrees with Maine de Biran’s principle, and he transports psychology from an abstract phenomenology into the living centre of personality. Jouffroy also said that we have the immediate feeling of our personal causality. In his recent dissertation Sur la légitimité de la distinction de la psychologie et de la physiologie, a work of fine analysis, he adds: ‘What is consciousness? It is the feeling that the I has of



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itself. – If man is in possession of this proof (the proof of his duality), he owes it to one circumstance alone; it is that he has an awareness in himself of something other than phenomena, that he attains the principle that produces them, the cause that constitutes consciousness and that he calls I. – What has hidden this proof from philosophers for such a long time is the old, inveterate opinion that our consciousness grasps only the acts and modifications of the personal principle, and not at all this principle itself. – It is necessary to extirpate this consecrated proposition from psychology: The soul is known to us only by its acts and modifications. The soul is felt as cause in each of its acts, as subject in each of its modifications.’ From here to the explicit exclusion of the Baconian method, and consequently, of Scottish empiricism, there is only one step.24 The young school that these teachers have formed will assuredly follow them in this new course. To remain any longer submitted to the foreign doctrine would truly be, inventa fruge, glandibus vesci.25 * It still remains unclear whether, of the two propositions that the Scottish axiom contains, experience attains neither causes nor substance, the second must still survive, or if it is, like the first, refuted by experience itself. Is not the cause which is the very subject of inner experience substance, or is it still, in this sense, only a phenomenon, a superficial modification of an invisible ground, an unknown substrate? Maine de Biran showed that from the first inner experience revealing us to ourselves, we have along with the feeling [sentiment] of our present power an assured sense [pressentiment] of its permanence: we reveal ourselves to ourselves as a durable force. From the first experience, we believe therefore that we are in the absolute of our being what we know ourselves to be in the transitory and relative fact of a present action: ‘Thus’, says the profound metaphysician, ‘we can say that the relative and the absolute coincide in the feeling of force or free activity; and it is there, but there uniquely, that this thought of Bacon can be applied, so opposed in every other sense to our double faculty of knowing and believing: Ratio essendi et ratio cognoscendi idem sunt, et non magis a se invicem differunt quam radius directus et radius reflexus.26 Here, indeed, is the immediate internal apperception of productive force, as the direct ray, the first light that consciousness grasps? And this reflective consciousness of force or free activity that gives an immediate object to thought without going outside of itself, is it not like light somehow reflecting back on itself at the heart of the absolute?’27 But at the same time, Maine de Biran adds that we are inevitably ignorant of ourselves as substance, and that in this sense there is no direct or reflected light to clarify what we are in the absolute. Why? Because substance is the passive subject of modifications. We do not know ourselves except as free activity, and consequently we will never know what we are in the passive ground of our being.

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Thus, the will should be the limit of our knowledge of ourselves. Beyond that is an abyss without measure, an impenetrable night. It seems to me, in contrast, that in consciousness the will is not sufficient, and that, outside of the substantial reality from which we separate it, it is only an abstraction. The will manifests itself to itself, as has become clear, in the effort by which it produces movement. But effort supposes the resistance of the mobile and resistance itself supposes a movement to which it is opposed. It is not in the act of effort that the will can see itself commence movement. Effort supposes, as Maine de Biran himself recognized, an anterior tendency that, in its development, provokes resistance; this is original activity, prior to effort, which, reflected by resistance, comes into possession of itself and posits itself in voluntary action. Let us raise ourselves up from the motor will to the free will. All will in general presupposes a conception of the possibility of an object as an end to attain, of a good to realize; now, the notion of an object as a good presupposes in the subject that wants it the feeling that it is desirable. In order for the will to be determined by the abstract idea of its object, a real presence must already secretly move us. Before the good is a motif in the soul it is already, as by a prevenient grace, a motive, but a motive that does not differ from the soul itself. Before acting by thought, it acts by being and in being, and this is all there is that is real in the will. Leibniz said: action has its source in the antecedent disposition already inclined to action; the active force has for ground and substance tendency; it is tendency that constitutes the reality of acts and movements. – We believe we give these propositions their inner and true sense by saying: the will has its source and substance in desire, and it is desire that constitutes the reality of the very experience of will. However, desire is not the ultimate source of activity and consequently of consciousness; it has its own more remote ground. The object that touches and draws it, if it were foreign and external to it, would still never reach the depths of the soul’s profundity so as to stir its powers. In order to desire, it is necessary that, unknowingly, we take pleasure in it in advance and that we place ourselves in the object of our desire; that in some way we put into it its own goodness and felicity; that we are aware of ourselves in it, that there we feel ourselves, at bottom, already united, and that we aspire to reunite ourselves there again; this is to say that desire envelops every degree of love.28 And if consciousness has as its eminent form the ideal opposition of its object (not I) and subject (I) in the will, if it has as its immediate condition their imperfect union, semi-ideal and semi-real in some way, in desire it has their real unity through love as its ground. Love is no longer, like the Will, the abstract act of a principle intent on pursuing the end, still completely ideal, in which it has to realize its powers; and, consequently, it is not a simple mode of a substance. It is no longer even only, as is Desire, a movement by which the principle, transforming itself into its end under the immediate action received from it, tends to realize itself incessantly; it is the



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complete reality, the perfection, the consummation of the Principle, united to its end, identified with it. It is no longer a mode, it is the substance of the soul. Perhaps a full and adequate understanding of this is possible only in God. Perhaps in this sense the reflection seeking it is to the soul ‘what the asymptote is to the curve, which it attains only in the infinite’. But in this infinite it continually approaches the soul, as the asymptote itself approaches the curve; it expects it, predicts it as the limit and the accomplishment of all thought. And whereas science calculates and pursues the formula, who cannot recognize in himself, who cannot find in his heart the obscure but infallible awareness of this? After having located the soul in a tendency or immortal desire that determines itself unceasingly, like a living law, by a ruled sequence of external manifestations, on the basis of eternal love,29 will we still require an absolutely passive subject existing beyond this? What would this subject beyond or rather below all action be, if not: either the simple capacity to be, the naked power of the soul itself, a pure idea realized, or else the matter in which this power manifests and forms itself, and that exists only through the form that the power gives it to it? What would this be, not only in the soul, but in anything? The passive substrate of phenomena is only an abstraction formed by the imagination, and there is true reality only in the inner activity of Mind. They want to reduce it to phenomena, to exclude its intelligible ground, its substance; but the ground, the substance is Mind itself, whose nature consists in understanding and possessing itself. What it conceives above and beyond Nature is what it sees in itself, what it is itself. ‘For the Mind is not invisible, but the only visible thing.’ Is it not time finally to give up searching outside of oneself, in its work, for the idol that is inert matter, and to recognize it as the universal principle, substance and essence, as the first cause of all things? – Stripped of its legitimate dominion, chased from its own centre, exiled from itself, it appears to be dying today in the void and in doubt. It will rediscover, when it has retaken possession of itself, the faith that is the essence of life.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Translated from the English by Louis Peisse. It was published with a preface, notes, and an appendix written by the translator. Fragmens de philosophie, p. 200. Fragmens de philosophie, p. 202. Fragmens, following from volume III of the French translation of Reid, p. 404. Fragmens de philosophie, p. 26. Fragmens, p. 84. Fragmens, Avertissement, p. iv. Fragmens, p. xiv.

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Jugement de Schelling sur la Philosophie de M. Cousin, translated in the Revue germanique, October 1835. 10. Jouffroy has already identified this difference (Preface to the translation of Reid, p. clviii). 11. Likewise with space; in contrast, Scottish philosophy counts time and space among our ideas. 12. [Condillac, É. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. H. Aarsleff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 11.] 13. Œuvres, tome III, p. 185. 14. Idéologie (1827 edition), p. 86. 15. In his first work, the treatise on Habit. 16. Œuvres (collected and edited by Cousin), p. 374. 17. Ibid, p. 372. 18. [Bacon, Di Augmentis Scientiarum in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. VII, ed. Spedding, Ellis and Heath, Houghton Mifflin, 1900, vol. II, pp. 128–9 and, for an English translation, vol. VI, p. 122: ‘For the wit and mind of man if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and bring forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit’.] 19. [apperception is perception with reflection conjoined.] 20. [Ennius, Annales: ‘to which neither do our bodies nor our souls flow, but certain images of us, pale in wonderous ways’.] 21. Œuvres, pp. 389–90. 22. Thatsachen des Bewustseyns, p. 461. 23. Œuvres, French translation, pp. 455ff. 24. In the preface to his anonymous translation of Dugald Steward, in 1825, Farcy already said: ‘Induction cannot be considered as the true and sole philosophical method. – It gives us the sagacity to grasp relations and perceive the most remote results, but not the reflection that folds the mind back onto itself, and accustoms it to grasping itself always in its living action, instead of deciding on itself from external effects.’ Si qua fata aspera vincas! [See Virgil, Aeneid 6, 882, which ends with rumpas rather than vincas: ‘Couldst thou break thro’ fate’s severe decree’ (Dryden).] 25. [‘to feed on acorns, when corn has been discovered’. This is a nod to Leibniz’s fifth letter to Samuel Clarke. The passage is translated from the Latin in Ariew, R. and Garber, D. (1989) Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 344]. 26. [This, it seems, is Maine de Biran’s free rendition of a passage from Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientarium. See The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. VI, p. 125: ‘for the truth of being and the truth of knowledge are one, differing no more than direct beam and the beam reflected’.] 27. Œuvres, p. 250. 28. Amor complacentiae, benevolentiae, unionis [Complacent, benevolent and uniting love]. 9.



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29. Leibniz (Erdman edition), p. 158: ‘We must add a soul or a form analogous to a soul … that is a certain urge [nisus] or a primitive force of acting, which is itself an inherent law [lex insita], impressed by divine decree’ [Translated from the Latin in Ariew, R. and Garber, D. (1989) Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 162–3, 191: ‘The nature of substance consists, in my opinion, in this ruled tendency from which phenomena arise in order’].

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3 Essay on Stoicism In order to account for the nature of man, from the earliest eras the Hebrew religion had invoked a holy and all-powerful God, a God eternal, anterior and superior to the world, a unique author and a sovereign legislator of all things. In contrast, the innumerable divinities of other religions, notably of Hellenic religion, were but particular powers, limiting each other, similar to the things of nature, subject to more or less the same imperfections and vicissitudes. Consequently, in perceiving in the successive phenomena and diverse parts of the universe a series and an order that could hardly be explained by the discordant wills of the gods, or by the hazards of their adventures, it soon became necessary to discover, by means of reason, the universal ground of things about which mythology remained silent. Such was, it seems, the origin of philosophy in Greek culture. The ground of things, as the first philosophical authors envisaged it, was matter, a substance from which things were formed, and which remained unchanged under their most diverse appearances; it is what persists without changing, through their vicissitudes, and that back into which they ultimate dissolve. This was water, according to Thales; air, according to Anaximander and Diogenes of Apollonia; according to Anaximander, it was an infinite mixture of different elements. In contrast to the systems explaining things solely by their matter, another doctrine arose early on, one seeking higher principles. This doctrine was that of the Pythagoreans. Within astronomy, within music, within geometry, they said, it is evident that number is essential in all things. It is number that measures, regulates and orders everything. The ground of things lies thus, for them, in numbers,1 and, before numbers, in unity, mona&j, which is their source and common measure. This theory was quickly succeeded by a still more elevated one. According to Plato, numbers do not suffice to explain beings. Do we not find, in very different things, identical numbers?2 That which makes every being what it is, is, following Plato, the form that characterizes and defines it, and the numbers themselves are merely elements of it, and they still belong, in some manner, to matter. The matter in every being is variable and unstable; the form is what endures and subsists. The individuals, in which form is associated with matter, are born, die, appear and disappear. Only forms, in abstraction from material diversity, only

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genera and species remain stable; only they are veritable beings; and only they are the objects of a veritable science. According to Plato, then, the ground of things is to be found in these immaterial types, of which sensory objects provide no more than imperfect imitations; these are the forms or ideas, ei1dh, i0de/ai, which do not belong to the senses like material things, but which are contemplated by the mind’s eye in a higher sphere. The ground of forms themselves, the primary principle – God, in a word – is the form most removed from any material element, and that consequently is the most universal; it is absolute unity, or the idea of unity. In this theory, philosophy rose from the perspective of mathematics to that of dialectics: now it was to elevate itself further, in a new progression, to the perspective of metaphysics. Is it indeed true, Aristotle asked, that in the Forms, as conceived by Platonism, the ultimate grounds of the things that we see are to be found? The things that we see, changing unceasingly, pass from one form to another. This universal movement is nature itself. The universal ground of things sought by philosophy since Thales can reside only in the cause of movement. But can these generic types, these abstract universals of all individuality explain movement? They are much rather, says Aristotle, principles of rest and immobility.3 Yet if it is now accepted that it is the form, the essence, and not matter, that should be acknowledged as the real cause, and if, moreover, the real cause is that of movement, we have to conclude that the forms, as Plato conceived them, are not yet the true forms and essences. And, indeed, genera and species, universals, whichever they are (ta& kaqo/lou), being necessarily indeterminate – since they can always receive a particular determination – are still a sort of matter taking form only in the individual to\ kaq’e3kasqon. Form in the proper sense, as determined, and thus as truly existing, as capable of impressing movement, is the form that constitutes individuality. This is what is called the soul of every animate being. What is the nature of this form, constitutive of the individual itself? This is what emerges, according to Aristotle, from the analysis of movement or change (for such is the general sense in which he employs the term ki/nhsij4). To change is to leave behind one form in order to assume another. In addition to these two forms there is therefore a third thing which is capable of successively adopting both. This third thing is what is called matter. Hence, matter can be defined as that which is capable of form. In contrast, since matter becomes actual and effective only by form, it is form alone that properly speaking is; form is reality, the act of existence, e0ne/rgeia. Matter, in abstraction from any form, considered in itself, is nothing effective or actual: e1rgw||, e0nergei/a. It is therefore reducible to virtuality, to power, du&namij. What then is the cause of movement by which power passes into actuality? Act itself; for whence would matter, which is by itself merely capable of form, but which does not yet have it, whence will it receive the form, if not from that which actually possesses it? Movement thus moves towards and proceeds from actuality. Actuality,



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which is not movement, since it involves no change or variation, but which is the goal of movement, is also its principle. Now, having established there is in nature nothing exempt from movement, and, subsequently, from matter, actuality in the highest sense can be found only outside matter and nature; this is the action of thinking. And what sort of thinking exactly? The thinking unmixed with any material or sensible element: the thinking of thinking itself. The thinking of thinking is therefore the principle on which nature as a whole depends; in other words, this is the primary and universal cause called God. Thus, in the new theology, a truly living God succeeded the simple idea of the Platonists, that inanimate and impotent deity. For, says Aristotle, thought comes from life, the most perfect life, from which an untainted felicity is also inseparable. Since God is the eternal act of pure thought contemplating itself, it can be defined as the eternal, perfect and sovereignly happy living-being: Kai\ zwh\ de/ ge u9pa/rxei: h9 ga\r nou~ e0ne/rgeia zwh\, e0kei=noj de\ h( e)ne/rgeia … fame\n de\ to\n qeo\n ei]nai zw~on ai5dion a!risqon, k.t.l.5 How does divine life, how does immutable and immobile thought produce the life of nature that is called movement? As a desired thing moves, without being moved, he who desires it, as the one loved attracts to it the one who loves. If thought can put the world into motion, then this is because it is the eminent form from which beings in their variety are more or less remote, but towards which, from near or afar, they all tend as if to their ultimate goal and supreme good. From simple gravitation (the first sketch of life), to vegetation, by which the plant grows and reproduces itself; from vegetation to sensation, constituting higher animal life; from sensation to human reason, enlightened by divine intelligence, nature does nothing else than raise itself, from the obscure grounds of an almost wholly virtual existence, to an increasingly perfect activity, and, less and less mediately influenced by this supreme good that moves and attracts it, transforms itself gradually into this supreme good. In all the different degrees of the immense scale of things, there is everywhere one and the same thought, divided in some way from itself, dispersed in all directions into material multiplicity, but which, gradually retrieves itself, re-acknowledges itself and reunites with itself. Beyond nature, beyond the world, thought, in possession of itself, facing itself, penetrating itself with its own light, immovable and alive at the same time. But so many problems arose with this new doctrine, problems that it did not seem able to resolve! How to conceive the influence on the material world of a cause so profoundly separated from any matter? How to imagine the way in which we could depend on it, and by what ties the human soul would be attached to it? How to represent the very possibility of an action whose simplicity does not admit any succession or movement; how to represent to oneself an intelligence whose indivisible unity excludes even this ultimate distinction between that which knows

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and the act of knowing, without which it seems impossible to grasp any longer what thinking would be? The time had not yet come in which such an elevated theory, that would dissipate all clouds, could hold sway. Misunderstood by Aristotle’s own disciples, it remained after him in oblivion and abandonment, covered over by its abstract formulas, like an obscure prophecy, of which a distant future would have to develop the sense and justify the promises. Two systems now arose that were going to divide up the world; two systems opposed to each other on almost every point, but which both enclose within the limits of nature, and reduce to corporeal things, all truth and goodness. Those systems are these of the Epicureans and the Stoics. From the beginning of philosophy, while the motive cause became everincreasingly important in science,6 a doctrine had appeared, inspired by hatred of superstition, which rejected as a vain fiction any causes as such in order to deliver humanity from the servile subjection in which it was held by fear of supernatural powers. According to this doctrine, there is nothing real but inert bodies endowed to all eternity with purely geometrical properties; bodies immutable, indivisible and in movement within the void to all eternity, and whose moving apart and coming together constitute all that happens in the world. Consequently, and since all reality is reduced to inert matter, and to changes of relations in space, there is no other mode of cognition than the impulsions received by the senses; no other good and no other ill, nothing to aim for and nothing to avoid except the pleasurable or discomfiting impressions attached to sensations, except pleasure and pain. Such was the system of Leucippus, Democritus and of most of the Sophists; this system is the one that Epicurus reproduced while mixing it with foreign elements borrowed from Peripatetic metaphysics. According to Leucippus and Democritus, everything being inert and passive, bodies do not move themselves, and movement comes to them only by shocks, plh/gai, succeeding each other to all eternity.7 Epicurus acknowledges the principle, established by Aristotle as the foundation of Metaphysics, that one cannot, in order to explain a fact, infinitely go back from cause to cause; and he attributes to the atoms a natural movement, a primary source of all other movement: this natural movement is what is called weight. There is more: by virtue of weight alone, which is the same for all atoms, with all of them having the same direction and the same intensity, the atoms would descend eternally into the abyss of the void in parallel, like drops of rain, without ever meeting each other: imbris uti guttae caderent per inane profundum, says Lucretius. But then how are things formed? Since there are beings, assemblages of atoms, it is necessary to admit that the atoms can – though without intelligence, and hence without any design but by pure chance8 – deviate, to a minimal degree, from the line of their natural fall. This deviation is what Epicurus



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called declination. After attributing to brutal and inert bodies natural movement, he also accords to them, with a second hypothesis, the spontaneous activity, the privilege of intelligence, which Aristotelianism had just made the primary origin of the universe. Now, moving from physics to morals, if felicity and the good are simply pleasure, how can an inalterable felcitity be secured amidst the continual variations of sensations? How does Epicurus solve this problem posed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first to make calmness, inseparable from security, an essential condition of what is truly good?9 The same way he solved the problem of the formation of the Universe: by the combination of inertia with free will. First, since there are no other pleasures, according to Epicurus, than those deriving from the senses, and since all these pleasures result from satisfied needs, pleasure is nothing but the cessation of pain. Pain is what is felt when some external impulsion violently disturbs the particles that compose the body; pleasure is what one feels when the particles take their place again. From disorder arrives pain, while pleasure results from the return to order. Pleasure consists therefore only in the cessation of suffering, and the true good, the only one to which we should aspire, is that of not suffering. – But how to avoid all the causes of suffering? First of all, says Epicurus, fear of what is bad occupies a much greater place than the bad itself among our pains. The biggest cause of fear is superstition, opinions concerning the power of the gods, destiny, and a future life, concerning, in a word, the supernatural world. By understanding that there is nothing but matter and movement; that the gods cannot change the course of things; that they have nothing to do but to live idly and exempt from any worry in the empty spaces separating the worlds; and that ultimately the soul, comes to an end like and with the body, physics heals us of the salient part of our ills. Indeed, everything in the religious beliefs of ancient times, often painted only in happy colours, was an object of dread and terror. All movements, all noises in nature seemed to be the gestures or the voice of terrible forces, always ready to strike. A vision, a lightning-flash, a bird passing in the air, a dog or a hare traversing the road, an accidently uttered word – everything was a disquieting omen, the subject of ceremonies, penance, offerings and sacrifices. Beyond the capricious will of the gods, there awaited a destiny even more redoubtable, because unbendable. Finally, after this unfortunate life, there is another life, another place of agonies, where most souls find only torture, where even the just and heroes still have to regret, amidst the shadows of Erebus, their dwelling on earth. Such were the images with which religion overwhelmed minds;10 in freeing man from them, Epicurus released humanity from a burdensome servitude. Hence the culture of thanksgiving that the Epicureans dedicated always to his memory, as to a sort of redeemer;11 hence the grandiose reunions in which they celebrated together on the day of his birth, and which he himself was careful to prescribe. His venerable

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image always accompanied them: sometimes painted, sometimes engraved on vases. Changing anything whatsoever in the doctrine was considered by them as a sacrilegious enterprise; one of his disciples had fallen to his knees in order to adore him; and Lucretius seems almost to wonder whether the sage who came to smash the ancient idols, whether this liberator of enslaved humanity was not himself a being above the human condition, a being worthy of divine honours. However, if science puts an end to these miseries of opinion whose source is ignorance and superstition, how to avoid all the real agonies of life? By keeping one’s distance from public affairs, by living in obscurity, by avoiding, as Epicurus advises, the worries of the family, the worries accompanying a cherished wife and children, one can elude many ills. But freed from all the miseries of the soul, do we have an assured means of escaping the bodily pains, which temperance itself and the most attentive prudence are not always able to avoid? There is one such means, which is always in our power. The atoms can decline to a greater or lesser degree from their natural route: our soul, formed from more mobile atoms, also has the capacity to deviate, to decline at will the direction that nature has imprinted on it. Nothing therefore prevents us, if pain comes to besiege us, turning away from it or fixing our thoughts on the memory of a bygone pleasure, in waiting for a future pleasure; a waiting that will certaintly not be worthless, a hope which cannot be wrong, since pleasure is nothing but the end of pain, and all pain comes to an end, if only by death. In order to extract for a moment the atoms from the uniformity of natural law, in order to interrupt the effect of the eternal weight and to begin, without the intervention of a superior power, constructing the world, Epicurus made use of declination as an arbitrary supposition. In order to subtract human destiny from the fatality of circumstances, in order to interrupt the chain of natural causes ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur, he also invokes free will. Free will is also declination. Declinamus item motus nec tempore certo, Nec regione loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens12

says Lucretius. And further on: … Ne mens ipsa necessum Intestinum habeat cunctis in rebus agendis, Id facit exiguum clinamen principiorum Nec regione loci certa nec tempore certo.13

By declination, just as the atom escapes the necessity of its own nature, the soul escapes its destiny and heads independently to wherever pleasure leads it. … Fatis avolsa voluntas, Per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluptas.14



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Independence is the true object that the Epicurean pursues, the supreme good to which he aspires. Pleasure itself, as we have seen, is for him only a release from the subjection in which our needs detain us, and from the suffering attached to it. Nature itself leads us unceasingly towards this deliverance from the pains of life, and by an easy means: nature initiates the emancipation and it falls to the will to complete it. In sum, Epicurus, as well as his predecessors Democritus and Leucippus, sees in the idea of a supernatural world merely a source of servile terrors. Humanity has borne, before him, the overwhelming yoke of religion, and he wants to deliver man from it.15 He dispelled from nature these redoubted divinities that filled it with their wonders, and leaves in their place only geometrical and mechanical laws, which are hardly mysterious. But, extracted from the empire of its gods, will humanity still remain bound by the chains of natural fatality? Its fate would only be worse. ‘The divinities can be inflected, but destiny is rigid’, said Epicurus; and just as he delivered man from the gods, he delivers man also from fatality. By declination, he made the intervention of divine will in the constitution of the universe useless; by declination, extended to the human will, he extracted man from destiny and thus completes the task of his emancipation. But on what grounds could Epicurus establish both this declination and the free will that he deduces from it? By eliminating the divine principle, by having only non-living atoms remain, he destroyed, both in nature and in man, the source of action;16 declination in the atom or in the soul is consequently nothing more than an inexplicable fact, a fortuitous accident for which it is impossible to give any reason. Once the divine cause is rejected as a superstitious dream, and reality reduced to inert matter, dispersed in the void where uniform weight moves it, the only remaining option is to invoke, in order to explain both nature and man, an unintelligible chance. Epicurus, says Tertullian, Liberans a negotiis divinitatem et in passivitate omnia spargens, ut eventui exposita et fortuita … The thought from which Stoicism proceeds is quite different. One of the first and the most renowned Stoics, Cleanthes, characterizes the philosophy of pleasure by the idea of relaxation, a!nesij.17 Stoicism is founded on the diametrically opposed idea of effort or tension, to/noj. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics think that any reality is enclosed within the limits of nature, of sensory existence, and that there are no other beings than bodies. For the Epicureans, bodies are reducible to sheer matter, a brute and inert substance; the primitive constitution and primary movements of elementary bodies, the origin of all things are facts without cause or reason, for which only the idea of chance is fitting. For the Stoics, on the contrary, there is nothing without a reason, and which reason cannot explain. Nature under the law of reason: such is, then, the world of the Stoics. Aristotle demonstrated that only that which acts is a reality, that being and acting

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are one and same; that the act or action is being itself. This maxim is the starting point of Stoicism.18 But while Aristotle recognized as necessary to the explanation of movement a primary action without movement, that of thought, superior to time as well as to space, for the Stoics this kind of action is a pure chimera; acting is nothing other than effectuating, doing, poiei=n, nothing other than determining an external movement by moving oneself.19 By the sheer fact of being active, it is therefore mobile, and consequently material and passive, and thus also corporeal. Given that any being is therefore active and passive at the same time, there are in every being, following the Stoics, two principles, the one passive, the other active. By the first, a body is capable of all kinds of modifications and movements; this is matter, u3lh, which forms substance, ou0si/a. The second principle is the cause, ai0ti/a, which makes of matter this or that determined thing, which characterizes matter, endowing it with quality; and this is why the Stoics name it quality, poi/othj.20 Moreover, what is true of matter in general is also true of all its parts. In all of matter, there is therefore not a single part, however small it may be, which does not receive from quality its character and its properties. Thus the quality of the Stoics is the essential form of the Peripatetics. Also, just as in the Peripatetic doctrine, in the Stoic doctrine the active principle, which is the cause of all that which becomes matter, is what explains things, what accounts for them, and is, as the Stoics named it, reason, lo&goj. But whereas in the philosophy of Aristotle the form, without which matter cannot exist, is, in its essence, an immaterial act, and has an effect in nature only by the attraction that it exerts without moving, for the Stoics, in contrast, although matter is inseparable from the active principle, or from the cause, that cause is itself no less inseparable from matter. Matter cannot subsist without the force maintaining it; but nor can the force subsist without the place matter provides for it: Neque enim materiam ipsam cohærere potuisse, si nulla vi contineretur, neque vim sine aliqua materia; nihil est enim quod non alicubi esse cogatur.21 There is more: active power is not only inseparable from matter with which it constitutes a body; given that it moves, it follows that, if it is true that everything active moves, it is itself corporeal. All the forces, all the qualities are but bodies.22 If the constitutive quality cannot be absent from all the parts of matter in which it resides, it is not present in them only as form or soul is according to the Peripatetic system. It is physically and corporally coextensive with matter; it embraces matter in all its contours, it traverses and penetrates matter in all its depth; it occupies matter, filling up space with it.23 In this manner, the principle that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time is overturned.24 The Stoics, with the hypothesis of absolute penetration, attribute to a body, in order to make it play a role belonging to an incorporeal cause, a property which excludes the very idea of body, in the same way as Epicurus with his hypothesis of declination. Moreover, if the cause is for the Stoics the reason (lo&goj) for the modifications of matter, it is not the case that it is,



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as in the philosophy of Aristotle, the final immobile cause towards which movements direct themselves; it rather moves at the heart of matter and produces within it successively and in an orderly fashion, like a seed that grows, the multiplicity which it contains; and this is why the Stoics call it, with a name which includes at the same time that of reason and that of semen, a seminal reason, lo&goj spermatiko&j.25 Also, while in Aristotle’s physiology the work of reproduction was divided between the two active and passive principles, in which the passive principle, the female, was considered as furnishing matter, on which the male principle impressed movement, for the Stoics, the germ comes from the male; it reunites in itself the matter and the force organizing it, and receives from the female only nutrition and augmentation.26 The Stoics represented the cause, uniting the active principle and the passive principle, as the male and female together.27 This is what the Pythagoreans had already done before them. Now, there is a body that unites the most active force with the passive element of matter, a particular body subtle enough to penetrate everywhere without difficulty. This body is the one that the philosophers in general, and particularly Heraclitus, supposed to contain the efficient, motive cause: fire. From the four elements of which everything is composed – say the Stoics after Aristotle, Plato and most of their predecessors – two are passive and two active: the former are earth and water, the latter air and fire. Relative to fire, air itself is but a passive matter serving as a vehicle for it. Fire carried by the air is the force which moves it, and which through it moves everything else.28 There is no part of nature, no element devoid of fire; earth is filled with it, as proved by the heat of so many sources springing from its bosom, by the flames spat out by volcanoes, and by the sparks that an impact can draw from the veins of stones; water becomes solid when the north wind reduces its warmth; and what keeps streams, lakes and seas liquid is therefore fire. Air itself, the coldest of all the elements, cannot anywhere be without fire, because air is but the vapour into which the presence of fire has converted water. The sky, finally, is wholly composed of fire.29 Furthermore, throughout nature, life is periodically illuminated and fades away with the help of warmth; and, in any particular being, it is from a source of warmth proper to it that all movements and functions proceed. Not only is fire distributed everywhere, but everywhere all action proceeds from fire and all virtue resides in it.30 Now, the fire that we see here below, and which we employ for the manifold concerns of life, when left to itself does nothing but destroy, and destroy without rule or measure what it encounters. The true cause, the seminal reason of things, in contrast, produces and preserves; and in order to produce and conserve, it proceeds with measure and with order. It proceeds, consequently, according to the rules of an art; a primordial art, on which all the other arts subsequently come to be modelled; an infallible art, bearing the stamp of supreme reason. This assured progress, filled with reason and art, is what can be seen in the stars, which are formed by the celestial

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fire; it is what imprints the warmth of the sun on the plants, making them flourish and sprout. Therefore it is only the fire of the sky that, hidden in all beings, of whatever sort, is the reason and the cause of their movements and life. This celestial fire, whose substance is a sort of air more subtle than air properly speaking, a breath, or spirit, pneu=ma; ths is what is termed the ether. In every being and in the entire world, the active principle can therefore be defined, following the Stoics, as an artistic fire, artifex, advancing by a certain path to the production of things, o(dw|~ ba&dizon ei0j ge/nesin;31 and its name is ether or spirit.32 Up to this point, and in establishing that everything in nature has for a cause the regular operation of the ether or of the celestial fire, the philosophy of Zeno and Cleanthes only reproduces, with new developments and applications, the ancient theory of Heraclitus. But what is the primary property of the cause? What is, consequently, the primary ground of its virtue and of its power? This is the problem, posed and resolved by Aristotle, to which, in turn, the Stoics came to provide a new solution. The essence of the cause, as Aristotle had said, is actuality, pure actuality; this is why the primary cause is neither fire, not any other material substance, but rather simple and immaterial thought. Fire is the primary cause, as the Stoics say now, because the essence of cause is effort, or tension, to&noj.33 We have already seen that, according to the Stoics, there is no act which is exempt from movement. If movement can be said to be imperfect, as Aristotle observed, it is not, for them, because it is a course towards an actuality; for it is by itself all act and all reality; it can be called imperfect or unrealized only in relation to the external effect that it produces, to whose completion it can lead only gradually.34 Thus if movement is irreducible to an entirely passive phenomenon (as the materialism of the atomists assumes), if there is an action commencing and causing it, and if, on the other hand, there is no action separate from movement, what then is left between the passive element of movement (the only one acknowledged by the atomists), and a pure immobile act, as Aristotle imagined it? There remains the active movement of effort, the effort or, according to the expression which was introduced into science by the Stoics, tension, to&noj, e0pi/tasij. In the Peripatetic doctrine, natural tendency, the immediate principle of movement, does nothing but obey the attraction of pure actuality; in such a way that nature, defined by Aristotle as having in itself the principle of its own movement, still seems to be no more, in the final analysis, than a passive power put into motion by the final cause. In the system of the Stoics, on the contrary, the primary cause is but the tendency determining itself in the heart of matter; in other words, it is the active tension of effort. Following Aristotle, everthing can be explained by actuality, and if thought is for him the primary principle, this is because, in its absolute simplicity, it seems to exclude any material and passive element; because it seemed to him to



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respond to the pure idea of actuality, exempt from movement. According to the Stoics, everything is explained by tension; and if spirit, or fire is the cause of everything, this is because tension constitutes its particular nature and its very essence.35 This is why nothing is strong against it or without it: Spiritus sine qua nihil validum, contra quam nihil validus est.36 Heraclitus said: Pali/ntonoj a)rmoni/h ko/smou o3kwsper lure=j kai\ to&cou.37 It was an ordinary thing for the ancients both to show, by the example of the lyre or bow that always remain taught, that nothing can subsist without an alternative succession of work and rest: 3Wsper ga\r o!rganon a1nesin kai e0pi/tasin lamba&non h9du\ gi/ nestai, ou3tw kai o9 bi/oj, said Democritus.38 Xrh/zei ga_r o( bi/oj tugxa&nen kai\ a0nesioj kai\ e0pita&sioj, said Criton the Pythagorean;39 and Horace: Neque semper arcum tendit Apollo.40 The words of Heraclitus came to be, moreover, the summary of an entire system of physics and cosmology. He explained nature, as did the Stoics after him, by a fire that is alternately enflamed and extinguished.41 It is very likely that, before the Stoics, he also had had the idea of explaining, by alternating tension and relaxation, the two alternative and contrary states of fire. It is possible to relate another sentence of the same philosopher to the same idea: that Jupiter made the world while playing.42 The world, according to Heraclitus, was the result of the partial extinction of divine fire;43 extinction, as we have just seen, was seemingly for him, as it was for the Stoics, relaxation succeeding tension. Hence, what is commonly considered, and rightly so, as having to alternate, in human life, with work, po&noj, spoudh/, so that relaxation alternates with tension was not pure and simple repose, but play, paidia&, jocus. The aim of play is rest, says Aristotle; because work demands effort and concentration; and this is why one has to employ games as a necessary remedy. The movement they give to the soul serves for it as relaxation, and, by the pleasure that the soul experiences, as rest.44 Danda est remissio animis, says Seneca, nec in eadem intentione æqualiter retinenda mens, sed ad jocos revocanda. And Aesop in Phaedrus: Cito rumpis arcum, semper si tensum habueris; At si laxâris, cum voles erit utilis. Sic lusus animo debet aliquando dari, Ad cogitandum melior ut redeat tibi.45

In Heraclitus’ phrase, it is necessary, perhaps, to acknowledge this thought, developed by the Stoics, that the world is a result of the relaxation, a1nesij, of divine nature. From another perspective, just when Aristippus of Cyrene was making of pleasure the sovereign good and goal of life, the Cynics – while proposing as an ideal for man the laborious life of Hercules,46 crowned in his apotheosis – established that the condition of any good, and perhaps of the good itself, is the opposite of pleasure, namely pain or work, po&noj;47 and the goal of pain, says Diogenes, is the eutonia of the soul, eu0to&nia:48 the correct and adequate tension.49

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But the first to make effort or tension the character and essence of the cause, Zeno of Citium, elevated it as a universal principle by which everything has to be explained, in nature as well as in man, even in God himself. Physics, logics, morals, all the parts of his philosophy, with all the particular theories that they comprise, are only developments and different applications of this single and unique idea of tension, and of the relaxation that is its contrary. First, any body, and as a consequence any being, according to the Stoics, has two fundamental properties: magnitude or extension, me/geqoj,50 and resistance, a0ntitu&pia. Both are explained by tension. Indeed, magnitude results from distance; a body, say the Stoics, is what is distant according to the three dimensions, trixh= dia&so0aton. Distances are straight lines; but a straight line, as the Stoics also say, is the line with the greatest tension, ei0j a!kron tetame/nh.51 Indeed, does not tension produce dilatation, and that is to say, the augmentation of distances? Thus tension constitutes rectitude, and rectitude extension. Linked to this theory are, without any doubt, the ideas that Seneca the Stoic expressed on the inflexible rectitude which, he says, belong to the good and to virtue: Honestum nec remitti nec intendi posse, non magis quam regulam qua rectum probari solet: quam si flectes, quidquid ex illa mutaveris injuria est recti. Idem ergo de virtute dicemus: et hæc recta est ; flexum non recipit. Rigida est; amplius intendi non potest.52

In the Latin language53 the word ‘rigor’ is employed in order to signify a straight line. It could be that this locution had its origin in the ideas and in the language of the Stoics. At least, it was probably only when Stoic philosophy was flourishing that came to be employed, concurrently with the word me/geqoj, in order to signify magnitude, the word e1kstasij, a word whose composition, like that of the analogue terms extensio and extension, involves the idea that magnitude results from the development of the tension. As for the resistance by which a body maintains, against external forces, the situation of its parts, cohesion is its principle. The first characteristic distinguishing natural bodies from simple aggregates, formed by exterior causes – such as a heap of wheat, a length of cord, a ship – is, says Seneca, that the natural bodies are continuous, sunexh=, in all of their extension; they are united or one with themselves. By this union of all their parts, they resist and maintain themselves in their form. Indeed, Seneca says, independent and detached parts, such as grains of dust, cannot resist and maintain themselves: Teneri disjecta non possunt.54 Resistance is an effort, effort or tension implies union; a composite body could not make an effort, if all its parts did not come together to contribute to it: Quæ intensio nisi ex unitate? – … Numquam enim contexti nisi per unitatem corporis nisus est, cum partes consentire ad intensionem debeant, et conferre vires.55 Yet from this it also follows that in order to keep unified a body composed of different and more or less heterogenous parts, as are all those that we see, it is



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necessary that some other, more homogenous and more unified body, penetrating it in in every way, contain it within its proper tension. And finally, says Seneca, just as there would be nothing moved by something other than itself if there were not beforehand something possessing movement only in itself, so too, in order to explain the cohesion and tension of natural bodies, it is necessary, in the end, to go back to a body that is unitary by itself, that gains its tension and cohesion only from itself: Et tamen mehercules per aliud nihil intendi poterit, nisi per semetipsum fuerit intentum. Dicimus enim eodem modo non posse quidquam ab alio moveri, nisi aliquid fuerit mobile ex semetipso.56 But this body essentially capable of tension is spirit, spiritus, pneu~ma. Do we not see whirls of wind carry enormous weights over great distances, raze edifices to the ground, tear up entire forests, stir and raise the waters of the ocean? Whence derives this force, if not from their tension? A tension that makes possible a common experience, that of the resistance that air in a goatskin opposes to pressure or an impact: Intensionem aeris ostendent tibi inflatα nec ad ictum cedentia.57 Two more things prove the powerful tension of aeriform bodies: their velocity and dilatation, velocitas et diductio. Sound is an effect of the tension of the air; yet the same sound can be heard at the same time across entire cities.58 But, however fast the air may be, there is an aeriform body, a spirit which is even faster. Though lightning and thunder seem to occur at the same instant, we see, says Seneca, the lightning before we hear the thunder. Light is therefore more rapid in its movement than sound. The ether, the matter of light, is quicker than air, which is that of sound; quicker, and consequently rarer and subtler, and, as a result, more tensed. In contrast, nothing is rarer and subtler than the ether, and, consequently, nothing is prompter than movements; hence there is no body whose tension will be stronger; therefore, finally, it is from the tension of the ether, and from the impulsive and motor force resulting from it, that any tension derives.59 This entails Cleanthes’ definition: tension is the shock of fire, plhgh\ puro\j tono&j e0sti.60 Aristotle considered the ether as a body different from fire, whose property was to move in circles; following Zenon, ether is but the purest part of fire, and it moves in a straight line like the other elements; and yet, Chrysippus adds, it moves forward and backwards, pro&sw kai/ o0pi/sw, at the same time. This double rectilinear movement gives rise, in matter, to two simultaneous and opposed effects. There is dilatation, which goes from the centre towards the circumference, and condensation, which from the circumference goes towards the centre, as Censorinus said: Initia rerum Stoici credunt tenorem atque materiam, tenorem qui, rarescente materia, a medio tendat ad summum, eadem concrescente, rursus a summo referatur ad medium.61 By these two movements, according to the testimony of Nemesius, Stoic physics explained the primordial properties of body, and consequently, all the others. According to the Stoics, said Nemesius, there is in the body a double movement of tension, a movement towards the outside, and a movement towards the inside. The

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first produces magnitudes and qualities, the second produces union and substance: Tonikh/n tina ei]nai ki/nhsin peri\ ta_ sw&mata, ei0j ta_ e1sw a#ma kai\ ei0j ta_ e1cw kinoume/ nhn, kai\ th\n me\n ei0j to\ e1cw mege/qwn kai\ poioth/twn a)potelestikh\n ei]nai, th\n de\ ei0j to\ e1sw e9nw&sewj kai\ ou0siaj.62 In this manner, for the Stoics, the tension directed from outside to inside produces the union producing cohesion and resistance, while the tension from inside to outside results in extension; the first produces, by means of cohesion, materiality, in which being and substance consist; from the second emerge, with all the forms in which it develops extension, the qualities or forces of different orders that constitute the more or less energetic activity of different beings. The general character of all the bodies that nature has formed is, as we have seen, that they are continuous, sunexh=, united or one, h(nwme/na; and this union is the effect of the tension of the spirit or ether that embraces and permeates their entire extension. This results in the definition borrowed from the Stoics by the Roman jurisconsults: Corpus continuum, quod uno spiritu continetur. Moreover, every natural body has its own manner of being or its individual quality. This quality is nothing but the tension of the particular spirit permeating the body, nothing but that very same spirit. In inanimate bodies, like a stone or a piece of wood, or in certain parts of animated being, like bones, nails and hair, the quality or force is almost indistinguishable from cohesion. It merely contains and maintains the parts in a constant order; the Stoics named it, after Aristotle, habit, e3cij.63 In plants, force is no longer a simple habit, but a generating cause; it is a nature, fu/ sij.64 Now it is by a tension of a superior order that ethereal spirit triumphs, in plants, over inertia and the weight of matter, in order to realize within it the functions of life and of nutrition. By the tension of the spirit which fills it, a seed lodging in a crack in a rock forces it open and pushes it apart; and it is by the same cause with which the tree rises to the sky and extends its branches in all directions, that the fragile crop raises and supports the weight of its ears. Quid autem aliud producit fruges, et segetem imbecillam ac virentes erigit arbores ac distendit in ramos aut in altum erigit, quam spiritus intension et untas?65 In the animal, to the functions of nature are added those of the soul, yuxh/. The functions of the soul are sensation, aisthesis, ai1sqesij, and appetite, o)rmh/.66 In sensation, which is only apparently passive, it is necessary, following Aristotle, to acknowledge an already active operation;67 according to the Stoics, the different senses can be defined as spirits tensed from the central seat of the soul to the different organs, pneu/mata a)po\ tou~ h(gemonikou~ e0pi\ ta_ o1rgana tetame/na.68 This is why between the state of waking, in which the senses are active, and sleep, in which they are at rest, the difference is one of tension and of relaxation. Sleep, Zeno said, is the relaxation of the sensitive spirit, a relaxation through which the soul contracts, subsides, and falls back on itself. The relaxation of the sensitive spirit carried to its dissolution is death.69



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Indeed, sensing, say the Stoics, is affirming and judging. The external object impresses on us, like a seal on soft wax, a sort of image representing it, named apparition or vision, fantasi/a,70 which Cicero translated as visum;71 the impression thus received is but a passion, pa&qoj, or passive affection of the sensitive organ. But this is not the whole of sensation. Sensing is recognizing the vision as real, as conforming to the object from which it emanates; it means approving it as such, and consenting to it. Only with this consent is the exterior object grasped, and – according to the expression employed for the first time in this sense by Zeno72 – it is comprehended, katalamba&nei. Any sensation, truly, is already a consenting, and, in other words, action, contention, tension of the soul. As for appetite, o(rmh/, one could define it following the Stoics as an extension of the soul towards the desirable object: e1ktasij th=j yuxh=j e0pi\ to\ o0rekto/n.73 Indeed, by pain, by fear, by aversion, the soul, say the Stoics, retreats and contracts; by joy, hope and desire or appetite, it rises, dilates, and extends itself. Thus the expressions employed habitually in Stoic philosophy in order to characterize the two opposed orders of affections: on the one hand, sustolh/ (contractio in Latin), mei/wsij, tapei/nwsij (demissio in Latin), and perhaps ph=cij; and on the other hand e1parsij (elatio) and diaxu/sij.74 For the Stoics, then, appetite and the affections attached to it are explained, like being itself, by the two contrary movements of expansion and concentration, or the tension and relaxation of spirit. Spirit is essentially reason and will; it is by affirming and consenting that it elevates and extends itself; it is in refusing and rejecting that it tightens and contracts itself. All these movements to which the appetitive part of our nature, to\ o9rmhtiko&n, is subject, and which are often considered as purely passive, are founded upon the judgement of the soul on the good and the bad, and these movements are, says Zeno, but its accessory, or enhancements, e0pige/nnhma.75 Moreover, according to Chrysippus, the appetites, like sensations, are nothing but judgements and affirmations.76 Thus if the soul, which is proper to the animal, is capable of sensations and desires, this is only insofar as it possesses, to some degree, the faculty of judgement, or reason; and this entails that the animal, without reason, can certainly receive impressions, but is incapable of sensations, visions, or of veritable imagination.77 Man alone is capable of this; indeed, only in him does there appear above sensation and desire the intelligent principle from which they emanate, and which commands them, katarxo\n ai0sqhsew&j te kai\ o(rmh=j;78 a principle that the Stoics consequently called the director, to\ h9gemoniko/n. This principle that thinks and feels in us, is ourselves; it is the I or the me79 that we know by conscience sunei/dhsij, conscientia.80 Hence what the action of the intelligent principle consists in, an action by which it completes sensation and gives impulsion to the appetite, is effort, or tension.

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Among the visions, fantasi/ai that come to us via the senses, there are some, say the Stoics, to which nothing real corresponds, or that represent only in a deformed way the reality from which they emanate. Some, in contrast, represent the object as it is, and which consequently make us apprehend or comprehend it, katalamba&nein. These are the visions that can be called comprehensive, fantasi/ai katalhp– tikai/.81 Now what is characteristic of these visions? They are characterized, say the Stoics, it would seem, by the force of the shock, plh/gh, that the senses receives from them. Any vision results from an impulsion from the outside: Quadam quasi impulsione oblata extrinsecus, says Cicero.82 Comprehensive vision, says Sextus Empiricus, in terms which are undoubtedly borrowed from the Stoics, is that whose evidence and impulsive force determine our assent: 0Enargh\j ou]sa kai\ plektikh/ …kataspw~sa h9ma~j ei0j sugkata/qesin.83 In other words, because the impulsion or the shock is grounded in tension, as we saw above, comprehensive or veridical vision carries with it the characteric of tension, e0narge\j kai\ e1ntonon i0di/wma, as Sextus also says.84 Finally, what means do we have, according to the Stoics, to measure this tension, whose effect we sense, and to apprehend its energy? It is the force with which the directing principle, tensed in all of our senses, reacts to the impulsion that it receives from the outside: Mens … quæ sensuum fons est … naturalem vim habet, quam intendit ad ea quibus movetur, says Cicero.85 It is therefore by its tension that intelligence, responding to the impulsion that visions bring to it, grasps and appropriates them, and transforms them thus into comprehensions or cognitions. Now, from numerous comprehensions or comprehensive sensations conserved by memory and related to each there is formed a notion, e1nnoia, a general idea, through which the particular facts that it envelops can be foreseen and anticipated, and which the Stoics thus called, like the Epicureans, anticipation, pro/lhyij.86 From several related notions, unified and linked, is formed this ensemble or system, su/stema, that we call a science.87 Bringing together and sequencing ideas, is, according to the Stoics, an action, the work of the will as well as of the understanding. This is why, assimilating science to the force by which parts of a body hold themselves together and resist what tends to separate them, they define it as a habit, e3cij, holding ideas united with each other, and which reasoning cannot unsettle; and this, they add, consists in a certain tension and power.88 It is perhaps also for this reason that they gave to science the name of art, te/xnh,89 which implies the idea of action. Zeno compared simple sensible vision, fantasi/a, to an open hand; approval, sugkata&qesij, to a hand half closed; comprehension, kata/lhyij, to a wholly closed hand; science, finally, to a hand not only closed, but strongly grasped in this position by the other hand. This was in order to make it clear that the different degrees of knowledge respond to different levels of energy, of effort, of tension.90



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This science, this art of linking ideas with each other, is, according to the Stoics, the proper function of reason. Reason, indeed, is for them the faculty by which – according to the expressions that Cicero borrows from them – man perceives the consequences, sees the causes and comprehends their development, compares resemblances, joins and links the future with the present: per quam consequentia cernit, causas rerum videt, earumque progressus et quasi intecressiones non ignorat, similitudines comparat, et rebus praesentibus adjungit atque annectit futuras.91 Comprehending the order of things and their linkage is therefore, according to the Stoics, the singular office of reason, lo&goj, logismo/j. The highest object of this faculty is therefore the complex unity constituting series and order.92 This distinct unity on which the likes of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle thought that order itself depends, the knowledge of which they attributed to a faculty higher than that of reason, this entirely simple and indivisible unity could, in the eyes of the Stoics, be only a fiction. For them, there was no intellectual faculty, one surpassing reason, whose object it would be.93 In the order of existence there is nothing more than extended and mobile bodies, and the force which is tensed in them; and there is nothing more in the order of knowledge than sense, and reason tensed in the senses, linking sensations and ideas by its tension. Nevertheless, if science does not consist, as the Epicureans supposed, in a simple recollection of wholly passive sensations, and if, on the contrary, it is reason that composes and constructs science94 from the materials with which experience furnishes it, would reason in this operation not have to be governed by rules, and rely on principles preceding experience itself? Indeed, although the Stoics do not admit the separate and self-subsistent ideas of the Platonists, although they reduce them to simple notions that have nothing real beyond our intelligence,95 it is no less true for them that some notions precede experience, notions by means of which we form all the others. For these notions the name of anticipations is perfectly fitting. Prior to all those that are products of our own art, which can be called artificial (texnikai/), they are natural, fusikai/; they are innate, e0mfu/tai.96 They are the beginnings of thoughts, inchoatæ intelligentiæ97; they are the foundations (fundamenta), says Cicero, on which the edifice of science is to be built; or, better, they are the germs98 in which all the particular forms of things are contained in an abbreviated form; they are, consequently, anticipated cognitions of these forms, and that are waiting only to be developed. Ea est insita et ante percepta cujusque formæ cognitio, enodationis indigens.99 Does the Stoics’ doctrine merge in this respect, despite their own protestations, with Plato’s theory, according to which science is but a recollection of what we have seen in a previous, wholly immaterial life, or, to put it another way, a more distinct awareness of ever innate notions, which are necessary to the understanding and independent of the senses? Despite the apparent resemblance, there is a great difference. In the Platonic doctrine, innate ideas explain knowledge not of sensible things, but rather of objects

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that are independent of them, a knowledge that Plato considers the only one worthy of being named science; but at the same time they entirely determine this science.100 In contrast, the innate anticipations of the Stoics are merely beginnings; but they are beginnings of every kind of knowing. Indeed, rather than intelligence and the senses being treated as two separate domains in this doctrine, they are barely distinguished. Intelligence, say the Stoics, is the source of the senses, and is itself a sense.101 This sense could only be the kind of touch through which the ethered spirit, the substance of the soul, recognizes and measures tension. And it is perhaps in the inner awareness of this essential tension of reason, the model and measure for all others, of which all possible phenomena are different transformations,102 that in Zeno’s doctrine natural and innate anticipations, the principles of any science, consist. In this way, the primary principles to which all science goes back, and that precede our experience, are still only the result of a prior experience of a more elevated order, the one that intelligence had enjoyed before being unified with this earthly body, when, as unmixed pure ether and fire, it partook in the life of the stars and heavens, and of God itself.103 If tension explains intelligence, it a fortiori explains the will. With logic reduced entirely, in principle, to voluntary tension, morals could a fortiori be reduced to it. It is not true, according to the Stoics, that the goal towards which the stars naturally tend is pleasure, as the Epicureans suppose. Pleasure is a relaxation of the soul,104 and it is rather in the energy, in the tone of the soul, as the Cynics say, that good and the goal consist. Indeed, as Aristotle said, pleasure is nothing but a surfeit105 adding itself to natural acts. It is to these acts only, towards the acts proper to and suitable for their constitution that all beings originally tend, when still unaware of pleasure.106 The constitution of a being, su/stasij, constitutio, is the development of its directing principle; in reality, it is the directing principle itself in its relation to the body: Constitutio est principale animi quodam modo se habens erga corpus.107 The nature of the directing principle – which is, we have seen, reason – is to know and to love itself. Any being, whatever it is, has therefore more or less awareness of and love for its constitution. To acquire everything appropriate to its constitution, to keep at bay everything strange, is its primary desire, the source of all its desires and actions. The goal towards which it tends, the aim to which nature pushes it, is therefore the maintenance of the essential harmony of its being, such as it results from the intelligent tension by which the directing principle, with order and measure, deploys itself in it. How does it proceed towards this goal? By a series of operations that suit its nature, kaqh/konta,108 or, following the Latin expression, its offices or functions, officia: in plants, these are nutrition and reproduction; in the animal, sensation and locomotion; in man, the acquisition of science, the exercise of temperance, courage, justice, in a word, the functions of reason, commanding the body and the passions; moreover, they are actions procuring the good of one’s fellows;109 since the



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fundamental principle of the human constitution is reason, and reason manifests itself better in humanity as a whole than in the individual, it is due to the appetency of every being to conserve its constitution that man has the privilege of prefering common utility to his own, and of finding in the good of others his true good. What is most elevated in man is what is proper to the community: To\ ou]n prohgou/menon e0n th|= tou= a)nqrw&pou kataskeuh|= to\ koinwniko/n e0sti.110 The principal function, the singular office of man is therefore, if necessary, to immolate himself and everything pertaining to him, in this great society, this universal republic of beings participating like him in reason.111 But however elevated the functions of man may be, there is something still more elevated, in which what is truly good resides: this is the order governing these functions, the harmony that they form, which is thus their beauty. Indeed, beauty results in the body, for the Stoics, from the symmetry or proportion of the members, from the agreeable concert of all the parts; what constitutes in life this fittingness and beauty producing the approbation of those with whom one lives is order, measure, constancy in word and deed; what is called beauty in a soul is the accord, the constancy and firmness of opinions and judgements; 9H e0n toi=j me/ lesi summetri/a h2 a)summetri/a ka/lloj h2 ai]sxoj, said Chrysippus.112 And Cicero, borrowing the ideas and language of the Stoics: Ut enim pulchritudo corporis apta compositione membrorum movet oculos, et delectat hoc ipso quod inter se omnes partes cum quodam lepore consentiunt; sic hoc decorum quod elucet in vita movet approbationem eorum quibuscum vivitur, ordine et constantia et moderatione dictorum atque factorum. In animo opinionum judiciorumque æquabilitas et constantia, cum firmitate quadam et stabilitate pulchritudo vocatur.113 Perhaps the Stoics were also the first to proclaim the rule considered by Horace as the first among all the rules, namely that in a work of art everything must be coherent, everything must be, from top to bottom, in accordance with itself.114 This accord with itself, coherence, o(mologi/a, is, according to the Stoics, as was shown above, the distinguishing characteristic of reason, and it is also, as we have just seen, the essence of beauty. Beauty consists, therefore, according to them, in the very characteristics of reason, and it is from reason, the primary cause of bodies and souls, that the movements and the figures of bodies, thoughts, words and the deeds of reasonable beings borrow their unity. In all animate beings, it is man alone who conceives what order, fittingness and measure are in word as well as deed. And in the things themselves that animals see as well as man, only man is sensitive to beauty, to grace, to the accord of the parts with each other. Nec vero illa parva vis naturæ est rationisque, quod unum hoc animal sentit qui sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat in factis dictisque qui sit modus. Itaque eorum ipsorum quaæ aspectu sentiuntur, nullum aliud animal pulchritudinem, venustatem, convenientiam partium sentit.115

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In the Stoic doctrine there is no cause, no principle above reason. Whereas in the systems of Plato and Aristotle the beautiful is but the imitation of something more excellent, which alone deserves the name good – which entails that the beauty of any object implies that it accords, not only with itself but also with something superior, the good – according to the Stoics, in contrast, since there is nothing more excellent and more perfect than reason, there is nothing more excellent or better than beauty, and the perfect good consists in beauty. Kalo_n to_ te/leion a)gaqo&n.116 Honestum est perfectum bonum.117 Consequently, the Stoics understand as good characteristics that their predecessors viewed differently as belonging to the beautiful; such is the characteristic of being the object of praise, ἐπαινός, laus. For the Stoics, as for Aristotle, a praiseworthy thing is one that has realized the good of which it is capable, and which arrives at the goal to which it is destined by nature. Omnis res, says Seneca, cum bonum suum perfecit, laudabilis est, et ad finem naturæ suae pervenit.118 That is why the proper object of praise is order and thus beauty. Quod laudabile sit, honestum esse conceditur, says Cicero. And further on: Si enim omne bonum laudabile est, bonum omne honestum est.119 And at another place moreover: Honestum vere dicimus, etiamsi a nullo laudetur, laudabile esse natura.120 But, following Aristotle, this entails – given that the supreme good is not what simply conforms to an end, but is rather the end itself – that the supreme good is not what is worthy of praise; to say that God is worthy of praise or eulogy, would be, he says, ridiculous. The sovereign good, perfection, the final and absolute end, is addressed by veneration, timh/.121 In contrast, for the Stoics, since there is no good above the beautiful, what is praiseworthy and what is perfectly good are one and the same thing. That is not all; beauty, which merits eulogy, is not only the supreme good; it is also the unique good. In the philosophy of the Academicians and the Peripatetics, the supreme good, source of perfect felicity, is placed above man. In order to participate in it as much as he is able, it is necessary that man first fulfil all the conditions of, and realize all the purposes of his nature. Formed from diverse parts, everything that leads them to their goal also leads him to his own and contributes to his felicity. Although the sovereign good is the immaterial life of contemplation, all the qualities of the soul and even of the body, and even more so the exterior things with which the soul and the body reach more easily their goals, such as reputation or wealth, all merit, to different degrees, the name of goods.122 For the Stoics, man possesses, in his reason, in the order and coherence that are its essential characteristics, the perfect good together with the perfect beauty; nothing else is necessary to him, nothing else is useful, and therefore nothing else is a good. Nihil est bonum nisi quod honestum est; quod honestum est, utique bonum.123



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The good is desirable, say the Stoics; the desirable is worth being sought out; that which deserves to be sought out is loveable; the loveable is worthy of approbation; that which is worthy of approbation is worthy of praise; that which is worthy of praise, is the beautiful. Nothing is good but the beautiful. We agree, say the adversaries of the Stoics, that all that is good is worthy of approbation; we also agree that all that is worthy of praise is good; but what one holds against them is that some things, simply by responding to the purposes of nature, are worthy of approbation, without being for all that worthy of praise, whose object is beauty. Why do the Stoics take to be self-evident what must rather be proved?124 This is because even if, according to Plato and Aristotle, goodness proceeds from a higher and more general principle than reason, from which things situated even below reason receive their relative beauty, in the eyes of the Stoics only reason judges and approves, and it is in itself alone that it finds, together with the unique measure of the true and the beautiful, the single rule of its judgement and approval. Consequently, the only thing worthy of genuine approval is that through which reason finds and knows itself, namely order, coherence, harmony, that to which praise is addressed and which constitutes the beautiful. It is thus not only true that everything beautiful is good, but it is also true that nothing is properly good which is not beautiful. There is no good above or below beauty. The beautiful and the good are but one. This doctrine entails that, not only wealth and good birth, but the very functions, the offices of man have strictly nothing that should be called good. There are, say the Stoics, two sorts of things in our nature. The primary, ta_ prw~ta kata\ fu/sin (prima naturæ, initia or principia naturæ) is composed of our natural functions; the second, deu&tera kata\ fu/sin (secunda naturæ) consists in the order and harmony of these functions; and only in the latter do our good and our purpose reside.125 It often happens, say the Stoics, that of two people, of whom one has sent and recommended to us the other, it is the latter that prevails in our opinion against the former. Similarly, since our functions, our offices, have made us recognize, in their natural development, what order, harmony, accord are, our esteem is wholly attached to accord, order and harmony.126 In the functions, we see nothing more than means; in the beauty produced by harmony and order we recognize the goal. The functions, by which each acquires or conserves everything required by his nature and constitution, conform in this way to reason, and they have to be defined as actions to which it is always possible to give a probable reason.127 However, abstracting from the order and harmony that they present, they have nothing of the beautiful or, consequently, of the good; they stand in the middle between good and evil, and this is why the Stoics call them means or indifferents.128 The functions compose the whole of life; life in its entirety, considered in itself, has nothing of the good or of the bad. Just as, in the body, quality is the principle and not

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the matter, so too it is in the way of life and not in life itself that good or bad consist. The good, says Zeno, is to live in conformity with oneself: zh|=n o9mologoume/nwj.129 Summum bonum vita sibi concors, says Seneca.130 It is characteristic of the sage to be always the same, to be during his entire lifespan only one person. Magnam rem puta, says Seneca, unum hominem agere; præter sapientem autem, nemo unum agit.131 Philosophia hoc exigit ut ad legem suam quisque vivat, ne orationi vita dissentiat, ut ipsa inter se vita unius, sine actionum dissensione, coloris sit. – Maximum hoc est et officium sapientiæ et indicium, ut verbis opera concordent, ut et ipse ubique par tibi idemque sis. This entails the precept: Ante omnia hoc cura, ut constes tibi.132 A life ordered in this way, always alike itself, is equal to a peaceful wave, rolling on an even course. Democritus had compared felicity to a calm sea; the Stoics happily compare it to the tranquil course of a river.133 Now, the source from which the course of life proceeds is moral disposition, said Zeno: 1Hqoj, ph/gh bi/ou;134 and moral disposition belongs to reason and will. If, indeed, order reigns in the functions composing human life, where is its principle to be found if not in the reason conceiving them and in the will practising them? Their beauty derives solely from reason and will. Omne honestum voluntarium est.135 Therefore it is from harmony, from the concord of reason and will with themselves, that the sovereign good issues; it is in this harmony and in this concord that it primarily resides: Summum bonum in ipso judicio est et habitu optimæ mentis. – Anima cum se disposuit, et partibus suis consensit, et, ut ita dicam, concinuit, summum bonum tetigit … Quare audacter licet profitearis summum bonum esse animi concordiam.136 Consequently, wisdom can be defined thus: always having the same will. Quid est sapientia? Semper idem velle et idem nolle. In Peripatetic philosophy, the supreme good, the final goal of man was a function superior to all our natural functions, to nature as a whole, and to human reason strictly speaking, namely knowing: this is the simple act of thought contemplating itself, a simple act from which reason and nature attain, as their primary cause, the order to which they are subjugated. For the Stoics, since nothing is above nature and the reason that is its cause, the supreme good is order, and before order itself, the will to order. Since there is no quality without matter, there is also no order without a subject to which it applies. The subject of the moral order in which our good has to be found, is our life and the functions it comprises. But it is only in the choice of functions that good consists.137 The goal of choice is therefore not the exercise of one of our functions, whatever it may be; choice, on the contrary, is the goal on behalf of which all the functions have to be exercised; for the goal, the good, is that of making a wise choice.138 Just as an archer tries more to aim well and to be a good archer than to hit what he is aiming at, just as he tries his best not, in truth, to hit the target, but rather



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just to try his very best – facere omnia quæ possit, says Cicero; e9neka_ tou= panta_ poih/sai par’au0to&n, says Plutarch – so too, in our life it is, says Chrysippus, the pursuit, e1fesij, which is the goal of the acquisition, teu/cij, and not the acquisition which is the goal of the pursuit; for reason and wisdom belong only to the pursuit.139 Clean clothes are not a good, says Seneca, but rather the choice of clean clothes; for the good is not in the thing, but in the choice, which makes our actions beautiful, and not the things themselves that we do. Non est bonum per se munda vestis, sed mundæ vestis electione, quia non in re bonum est, sed in electione, qua actiones nostræ honesta sunt, non ipsa quæ aguntur.140 In a word, the diverse elements from which human life is composed are the matter of the choice of reason; they are a more or less appropriate matter: this is why there are differences of dignity, merit, price (a!cia, dignitas, æstimatio, pretium) between them. If there were none, as a philosopher had said (Ariston of Chios), any choice would be impossible, and thus also any virtue and any wisdom. There are therefore things that conform to the goal of nature and others that are opposed to it; the former are near, or advanced, in relation to the good (prohgme/na, producta, promota); the latter are remote, withdrawn (ἀποπροηγμένα, remota); the former are to be adopted and preferred (lepta/, sumenda, præposita, præcipua); the others to be rejected (rejicienda, rejecta, rejectanea).141 In the first class are grouped primarily health, wealth, a good name; in the second, misery, malady and dishonour. But to be preferred above everything else are the functions or offices that suit our nature, such as the pursuit of truth, the exercise of justice, benefaction; to be rejected more than anything else are the actions contrary to these.142 This is not all: nature itself has placed among our functions the greatest order and the most just accord. In order to choose well, in other words, in order to choose so as to remain always in conformity with oneself, one has to do only one thing: follow nature, walk on the path that it has cleared.143 Nevertheless, however much it may conform to nature, the choice is of a wholly different order. The natural functions, say the Stoics, are acts that, once realized, reason justifies, but which, for as long as they are realized only by instinct, remain imperfect. Only in directing them to the true goal by an express will does reason imprint on them the seal of perfection. Wisdom consists in doing what instinct suggests to us, but doing it with a view to order.144 In this way, a harmony between the different parts of our nature is established; in this way, our entire life accords with itself. Tunc ergo vita sibi concors est, says Seneca, ubi actio non destituit impetum. And elsewhere: Ut inter impetum tuum actionemque conveniat, ut in omnibus istis tibi ipsi consentias. (Impetus is the translation of the Greek o(rmh/.) From a product of nature, our life becomes, by the intervention of wisdom, a work of art; and wisdom could be defined as the art of living: ars vivendi.145 The art of living does not consist in contradicting nature, it consists in doing what it wishes, but doing it with a view to harmony and beauty.

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No matter how appropriate to the goal the means may be, they are nonetheless not the goal; no matter how close to the good preferred things may be, they are not the good, and rigorously speaking, they have nothing of the good or the bad, and, and one has to place them in the very wide class of the middle things, intermediaries between good and evil, that are indifferent. The good is preference, choice, because the good is a single will, and because choice is the will. This entails, again, that the good consist in nothing else than virtue. Indeed, the virtue of a thing (a)reth, virtus) is its perfection.146 Any being, in nature, has its own perfection, and consequently its virtue. The animal, the plant, and even wood or stone have their own.147 But absolute perfection, of which only man is capable, is reason.148 The reason and the virtue really worthy of this name are one; virtue has to be defined, according to the Stoics, as well as reason, as a consistent accord with oneself. Virtue, they say, is a disposition that always conforms to itself: Dia&qesij o(mologoume/nh.149 – Dia&qesij yuxh=j su&mfwnoj au0th|= peri\ o3lon to\n bi/on.150 Virtus convenientia constat, says Seneca.151 And elsewhere: Perfecta virtus, æqualitas ac tenor vitæ, per omnia consonans sibi.152 The virtue thus defined is evidently constancy, constantia.153 Now, what is the principle of constancy; what makes one remain, despite obstacles, loyal to oneself and consistent? This is force. Thus it was to force, i1sxuj, that all the other virtues, according to Cleanthes, had to be reduced;154 Cleanthes, whose laborious life and his unfailing courage led to his being named a second Hercules. And, finally, what is the principle of force itself? This is, as we have seen, tension, to&noj.155 Just as the vigour of the body results from a sufficient tension of the muscles, soo to a sufficient tension in judgement and action is what constitutes the vigour of the soul.156 Thus the effect of virtue is in some manner to endow our actions and entire life with stability, solidity, a sort of invincible cohesion.157 In the same way that, in the order of science, the highest function of reason is to confirm by reflective affirmation the testimony of the senses, and thus to form from it thoughts (e1nnoiai) united among themselves by a powerful cohesion, so too, in the moral order, the highest function of reason and virtue is again to confirm, by voluntary choice, the suggestions of instinct, and, by an energetic and constant tension, to form from our operations and entire life a stable and solid whole of which nothing can alter the proportions or disturb the harmony. Also, just as, in physics, the rectilinear movement is the effect and the proof of the tension of ether; and just as, in logic, reason is signalled by its rectitude (o0rqo\j lo/goj), so too, in morals, virtue is apparent as an inflexible rectitude. Virtue is nothing else but upright reason: Virtus non aliud est quam recta ratio, says Seneca.158 Its progress consists in following a straight, in other words, the shortest line: Eu0qei=an pe/raine, says Marcus Aurelius,159 and elsewhere: Kata\ th\n su/ntomon a0ei\ tre/xe.160



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Finally, in giving to the natural functions the perfection they lack, virtue transforms them into straight things, straight acts (katorqw&mata, recta, recte facta). Perfectum officium, said Cicero, rectum opinor, vocemus, quod Græci kato/rqwma.161 And elsewhere: Quæ autem nos aut recte facta dicamus, si placet (illi autem appellant katorqw&mata), omnes numeros virtutis continent.162 Virtue is a straight line because it is the force identical to reason, at the highest degree of tension and energy, and thus perfectly rigid and inflexible. Recta est; flexuram non recipit; rigida est, amplius intendi non potest.163 This entails, first, that virtue has nothing in common with the passions. In Peripatetic philosophy, given that humanity was considered as the product of the cooperation of passive and unreasonable nature with the divine and supernatural principle of intelligence, the passive and unreasonable element of our constitution was held to be the matter of virtue itself; virtue was the passion or unreasonable appetite regulated by reason and transformed, by frequent repetition of action, into a stable habit. For the Stoics, reason being the principle of everything, and the appetites all flowing from it, as from their source, there are no entirely passive and purely irrational movements in the soul. What is called a passion can be only a judgement of reason on good and evil, and a voluntary movement. Virtue is but right judgement; passion can be only a false judgement, an aberration of reason in discordance with itself, and an unreasonable and defective will.164 For the Peripatetics, passions are movements of the soul capable of excess in opposite ways, and thus belong to the milieu in which reason has to fix them. For the Stoics, passions are nothing but excessive appetites, o(rmai pleona&zousai.165 Given that virtue consists in being in harmony with oneself,166 which implies measure and proportion,167 passion and virtue are absolutely mutually exclusive.168 But, finally, where does the excess constituting passion come from? The constancy proper to virtue derives from tension and the energy of the soul; the differences come from its relaxation. It is because of this that virtue, like reason, always advances in a straight line.169 Relaxation gives rise to four passions which are related to all the others: joy and desire, by which the soul is elevated and dilated to excess; sadness and fear, by which, shrinking back, it collapses into itself.170 All the passions are but the movement of reason, movements whose rapidity does not allow us the time to perceive them, and by which it relaxes itself in different directions to its natural tension.171 It is not that the virtuous man or the sage never feels anything like the passions that agitate the vulgar. But sadness is entirely foreign to him; satisfaction, xara/, gaudium, take in him the place of joy; volition, bou&lhsij, voluntas, that of desire; caution, eu) labei/a, cautio, that of fear;172 but these are peaceful and moderated movements, through which wisdom neither forgets its constancy, nor turns from its path.173 These are movements that obey wisdom, follow its law and observe its measure, and which thus manifest the force that binds them. The passions, on the contrary, by their excessive fluctuation, accentuate frailty.174

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Far, then, from virtue requiring the passions, it is ignorant of them, and it knows only the equal and regular movements that its constancy comprises and that prove its force. More, given that virtue is completely separable from any passive element and consists in reason alone, not only, as Aristotle said, is it impossible to possess one particular virtue without possessing all the others, but to exercise one is to exercise them all.175 Indeed, all – prudence, force, justice, temperance – are nothing but one virtue in different circumstances. It is the same principle that adopts, according to the diversity of the functions that it has to fulfil in our life, diverse figures and forms. Multæ ejus species sunt, quæ pro vitæ varietate et pro actionibus explicantur. In alias atque alias qualitates convertitur, ad rerum quas actura est habitum figurata.176 Furthermore, given that the tension constituting virtue is always carried to the highest level, as proved by the perfect rectitude belonging to virtuous actions, there cannot be degrees of virtue. Nothing, indeed, is straighter than the straight, more perfect than the perfect. Nihil invenies rectius recto, non magis quam verius vero, quam temperato temperatius … Quid accedere perfecto potest? Nihil. – Ratio rationi par est, sicut rectum recto; ergo et virtus, quæ non aliud est quam recta ratio. – Omnes virtutes rectæ sunt: si rectæ sunt, et pares sunt. Qualis ratio est, tales et actiones sunt: ergo omnes pares sunt.177 This also entails that virtuous actions are all equal between themselves, and finally that all those who realize them, that is to say all the sages, are equal. Similarly, virtue being unitary in degree and in nature, someone who does not have all the virtues has all the vices; anyone who does not possess, in all their plenitude, reason and science, knows nothing and is senseless; all the vices are equal, all bad actions are equal.178 Indeed, all curves, of any form, no matter how near or far they are to being straight lines, are equally curves; whether a person is one or a hundred miles from the goal, he is equally unable to attain it. Similarly, those not possessing perfect science and virtue, being by that very fact deprived of all virtue and all science, are equally senseless, defective, and thus miserable.179 The sage, in contrast, is incapable of error and opinion, and thus of passion.180 He possesses all science, and nothing is hidden from him. The arts themselves, which seem to have little to do with wisdom, are entirely in his possession; for only he possesses, in right reason, their principle and the primary source. Not only is he the only magistrate, the only priest, the only judge, the only orator, the only captain; he is also the only poet, musician, grammarian; more, the only tailor and the only shoemaker; in a word, he is the only artist and worker in any genre. He is this, or, to say the same thing, he can be it:181 Sapiens operis sic optimus omnis Est opifex solus.182

Not only does he know everything, but in possessing what everything should serve, everything belongs to him.183 He alone is the one with a right to things, the one able



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to put them to the use for which they are appropriate; only the sage, therefore, is rich, only the sage is a master, only the sage is a king. The sage knows everything, because in his reason he possesses the ground of all things; nothing happens to him that he did not foresee. And since this reason by which everything expresses itself is also the will from which everything is made, anything that happens to him he wants, for as much as he foresees it; he alone among men does what he wills, and consequently only he is free.184 Finally, added to these privileges that the sage possesses is another, which is that nothing in the world can deprive him of them. For Aristotle, given that the virtue and the wisdom of man consist in submitting what is passive in us to a divine principle, a sickness such as melancholy or delirium could, in bringing disorder into our nature, make us lose our virtue and our wisdom. For the Stoics, wisdom consists entirely in the rectitude of reason, which is man himself, and given that right reason has nothing passive, it cannot be, as from the moment man is in possession of wisdom, that an accident of whatever kind relieves him of it. Delirium, melancholy, drunkenness could disturb his senses and imagination, cause him strange visions; yet his reason remains whole, his wisdom untouched.185 According to the Stoics, then, reason possesses this perfect impassability that Aristotle and Theophrastus, and before them Pythagoras and Plato, attributed solely to divine intelligence, exempt from all matter, because reason consists in the most energetic tension of this spirit of fire from which all force derives, against which nothing is strong, and that nothing can unsettle. Yet reason is man; and thus the wise man, in whom reason reaches its perfection, enjoys – equal in this to the God of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle – absolute impassibility.186 Finally, this reason through which man possesses the supreme good is at the same time the principle of the rest of his being. We have seen that the force producing the cohesion of the body, habit, e3cij, is explained by the superior force manifested by vegetative life, in other words, by nature; nature, in turn, is explained by the even more superior force constituting sensation and locomotion, or by the soul; the soul, finally, by the principle of intelligence and will, or by reason. Not only sensations and desires, which constitute animal life, but the impressions and the obscure tendencies of vegetative life, and the simple forces of cohesion and resistance, are at bottom only judgements and volitions, emanations of the guiding principle. The guiding principle is therefore the germ, the true seminal reason from which everything issues and develops.187 It is at the centre of man like the spider sits in the centre of the web that it produces and that transmits to him impressions from the outside.188 It radiates, it expands into the different organs, like the octopus into its arms.189 By the faculties or powers emanating from it, or that are rather merely an extension of it,190 it embraces nature as a whole; and at the same time, in the awareness of the voluntary and intelligent tension that is its principle, it possesses

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inalterable perfection and felicity without anything ever being able to deprive it of this. However, above human nature there exists a superior nature; the universe and man himself demonstrate this. First of all, for the Stoics the world forms an ensemble whose phenomena are related to each other in a necessary manner. Indeed, all action being a movement, and any movement requiring a cause that accounts for it, all the events produced, including the free resolutions of the will, are the effects of anterior movements; the phenomena of all kinds composing the universe form therefore an uninterrupted chain of causes, in which each ring has its place determined by necessity. Caussa pendet ex caussa; privata ac publica longus ordo rerum trahit.191 In this way, while Aristotelianism acknowledged a primary actuality prior to movement that does not presuppose an antecedent cause, while in Epicureanism the incomprehensible exception of the declination of the atoms is imagined in order to escape natural fatality, according to the Stoic doctrine nothing is below and nothing outside the necessary chain of natural causes and effects.192 This is the Destiny of Hellenic religion, which is identified by philosophy with nature.193 It was a universal belief that everything is subject to the law of Destiny, everything and even the gods themselves;194 this is also a dogma of Stoic philosophy.195 But Stoicism adds to the common belief, first, that Destiny consists in the chain of natural causes and effects; second, that even if these causes and effects are determined by each other with irresistible necessity, a directing will, reason has indicated in advance the goal towards which the whole chain of facts is inclined, and thus has regulated this very chain.196 In every being, the various interconnected parts, the diverse regularly linked phenomena manifest the unity of their cause; this cause is the seminal reason, of which the different parts and functions of a being are only the development, and in which they have been preordained and preconceived. Now, between all the beings composing the universe, just as between the parts of any one of them, there exists an evident connection and accord. Things themselves that when considered individually, seem to be merely accidents and disorders, find in the ensemble their reason and justification. Opposites help each other; the bad itself serves the good.197 The unity of the great-all forming the world198 is such that each part senses something of what happens to the others. This is what makes the world a whole sympathetic to itself, su/mpaqej e9autw|,~ as is any living body, and this is proof that it lives, indeed, and that it has a soul.199 The accord and harmony of the several and diverse parts is such that beauty is clearly the principal goal in view of which the world is ordered,200 and it is the proof that the ground of the soul that animates it is reason,201 whose essence is the harmony with itself and the consistency in which beauty consists.



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Just as the destinies of a being are preordained in the particular seminal reason of which it is the expansion, so too the destinies of the entire universe are ordered in advance and for all time in the universal seminal reason,202 which consequently has to be called universal providence, pro/noia.203 This soul of the universe, this seminal reason comprising all causes, this cause of all causes, this invincible destiny, and at the same time this vigilant Providence, is God. The world, according to the Stoics, is an animated being, an animal properly speaking.204 The cause that moves it is therefore a soul; yet there is no being that the world does not greatly surpass, not only in grandeur but also in order and in beauty: there is no soul that does not greatly surpass the spirit of the world. The cause from which all other causes derive is necessarily superior to them. The cause, in the most perfect beings of the universe, is a subtle fire full of art. God, the cause of the entire world, is therefore the rarest and most subtle ether, the celestial fire at its highest degree of tension, wise or artistic fire par excellence;205 and in this way God is the most perfect soul, the wisest guiding principle, the straightest and most infallible reason. The God of Zeno is not, like that of Aristotle, a principle separated from matter, beyond all of nature, exempt from the movement by which it is animated, and acting on it only by the desire with which it fills matter.206 Far from it, the cause, like any cause, has its matter with which it which it is tightly bound; this matter is the world.207 God circulates in the world, said the Stoics, as honey runs in the cells of a honeycomb;208 it permeates the world in all its depths, and at the same time it embraces its immense contours; it occupies it inside and out. Intra et extra tenet;209 it fills the extension of the world, by its tension, as a whole: divinus spiritus per omnia intensus. And it moves it by moving itself in it. Futhermore, God could be called the world itself and nature; for, just as any being is nothing but the development of its seminal reason, so too the entire world is a development of God.210 Four elements compose all being: fire – of which ether is the subtle part – and air, water and earth. These elements differ only by different degrees of tension and rarity: since warmth or cold, which augment or diminish tension, change earth into water, water into air, air into ether, or reciprocally ether into air, air into water and water into earth.211 The elements are therefore merely diverse degrees of tension in one and the same substance. What is not ether itself is still only ether more or less relaxed. In order for a world to arise, it is enough that the divine element partially relaxes its essential tension;212 for the world to resolve itself into the divine element, it is enough that the divine element wholly reassumes its tension. In the beginning, there is but pure ether, occupying the entire extension by itself. It is relaxed in its central part, and this part, in condensing, is converted into air; air, in turn, is relaxed still more, and becomes water. Nature therefore is a liquid mass at the heart of a fiery sphere. In this mass the hope of a future world is hidden.213 It is this primitive sea that Heraclitus named the seed of the universe.214

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Soon, indeed, under the influence of the warmth of the sky and of the tension that warmth produces, a part of water dilates into vapour, and then into air; another part solidifies and constitutes the earth. The elements thus formed, the necessary result of their admixture and reciprocal action, according to the leading action of the superior element, is all the different beings, plants, animals, and man himself;215 but from the unceasing influence of ether, water is converted gradually into air; air is rarefied and becomes more subtle; the stars are nourished from it and grow. Becoming bigger and stronger, they consume gradually, after air and water, earth itself. Finally, the purest part of fire absorbs in turn all the stars.216 The beginning of the world was water; fire is its end. Ita ignis exitus muni est, humor primordium.217 Just as every year has it winter, in which the humid principle predominates, and its summer, in which warmth holds sway, so too each one of the great years, closed and reopened by the return of the stars under the same signs, has two great epochs, one of deluge and the other of fire; in the beginning of each of the periods filling the entire duration of the world, one can always find universal submersion, kataklu&smoj, and, at its end, universal conflagration, e0kpu/rwsij.218 However, the ether that has consumed everything is relaxed again; once again it gives birth, in its condensation, to inferior elements. Everything recommences as before, by virtue of the same necessity, and thus in the same manner, in the same order, with the same periodization. Conflagration is succeeded by restoration, a)pokata&stasij and regeneration, paliggenesi/a.219 All that was reappears without exception, without any difference, only to disappear again and reappear anew; and so on to infinity. Socrates has existed, Socrates will exist again an infinite of times, conversing with the same interlocutors, saying in the same place, in the same moments, the same things. In this way, the epochs of the world succeed each other and repeat themselves; and in this way, the endless chain of destinies moves round in an eternal circle.220 The belief in a perpetual return of similar epochs concluded by a general conflagration belonged almost to the whole of antiquity; in the Chaldeans, in Egypt, in Greece, the same symbol was uniformly used to express it: the Phoenix reborn eternally from itself.221 Stoic physics comes to confirm and explain this universal and ancient belief. The uniform periods of eternal destiny, this alternating movement repeating itself endlessly from the circumference of the world to its centre, and from its centre to its circumference, which consequently Heraclitus had called the descent, ka&qodoj, and the ascension, a!nodoj – this double and fatal movement constituting the life of the world, just as it constitutes, as we have seen above, that of every particular being, according to the Stoics, is nothing but the alternating tension and remission of divine nature.



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Hence everything is born from God, by a simple metamorphosis of its substance. By the relaxation of tension, it adopts successively all forms, it assimilates, it makes itself everything in everything.222 This leads to all the different gods honoured in popular religion, different denominations of the same divinity, according to the different regions that it occupies and the powers that it deploys there; the cause of all life is called Zeus (from zh=n); present in the ether, it is named Athena; in fire, Hephaistus; in the air, Hera; in water, Poseidon; in the earth, Demeter or Kibele;223 in any part and any place of the universe, and in any man, it is daemon or genius, dai/mon.224 This is the explanation of religion by nature; this is theological physics, the theology of the philosophers, containing all that is true in the two other sorts of theology, mythical theology, which is the work of the poets, and political or civil theology, which belongs to the legislator. Does God return to himself from nature by reassuming entirely his original tension? All the Gods disappear, with all particular forms of existence. Jupiter himself is no more; everything is reduced to ether, everything returns to the womb of providence, all multiplicity becomes unity again.225 But, thus reduced to itself, divine unity should not be identified in the system of the Stoics with the indivisible and perfectly simple unity of pure intelligence, as conceived by Plato and Aristotle. For the Stoics, divine intelligence has, like any quality, its matter, from which it is inseparable; extension, quantity is necessary and essential to it, and this is why it does not consist in an immobile actuality, in the way that the author of the Metaphysics had understood it – as the actuality in which thought, one and indivisible, contemplates itself – but rather in successive and multiple movement and tension. Divine intelligence, as the Stoics present it to themselves, like that of man, is nothing more than reason, the reason that reasons and discourses, lo&goj, logismo&j. However, in man reason traverses a more or less limited sphere, whereas the eternal object of divine reason, the object of its care, as it moves at the heart of the world, the object of its solitary meditations, when it returns to itself from the world and reduces itself solely to its Providence, is the whole, immense chain of universal destiny. If this is divine nature, there is no doubt that it prevails over human nature in power and duration. But duration and power, for the Stoics, are indifferent things;226 intellectual and moral perfection is the only good, the only thing worthy of praise and esteem. God knows everything; but the sage, possessing the very principle and measure of knowledge, possesses all knowledge worthy of the name. God makes everything; but the sage, in knowing what God knows, becomes the author of everything; it is true that all of the sage’s volitions are the necessary effect of antecedent causes; but is the same not true of divine volitions?

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Everything obeys destiny: it falls to us only to resist it or to consent to it. Volentem ducunt fata, nolentem trahunt. In consenting, the sage identifies himself with divine law; nothing happens to him, nothing happens in the entire world which he does not will as God. Becoming one by his reflected will with the will constituting everything, with it he partakes in the empire of the universe. Consequently, there is nothing, or almost nothing, which the sage lacks in comparison to the Divinity.227 Jupiter, says the Philosopher Sextus, has more things to give than the good man; but of two good men, the richer is not necessarily the better; of two men that know equally well how to steer the rudder, the one with the bigger and more beautiful boat should not necessarily be thought the most skilful. What advantage has Jupiter over the good man, adds Seneca? That he is good for a longer time? The sage does not consider himself as having less value because his virtues are enclosed in a smaller space. Just as, of two wise men, the one who died older does not die happier than the one whose virtue was circumscribed in a smaller number of years, so too God does not enjoy more felicity than the sage because he exceeds the latter in duration; one is not more virtuous in being virtuous for longer. The sage therefore walks alongside God as his equal, because he possesses, like God, reason in his perfection, and reason is everything.228 Opposed to systems like that of Epicurus, which – in order to evade the mysterious grounds of things invoked by superstition – renounces reason itself in explaining everything by chance, Stoic philosophy is no less opposed to the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, which acknowledge as the ultimate ground of things, on the one hand, an inferior element that in its vacuity escapes reason, and, on the other, a principle that, by its intelligibility, exceeds what is, properly speaking, called reason and reasoning. For the Stoics, the matter that reason permeates, so to speak, to the bottom of its being, and the reason that remains always subject to the conditions of matter, are together the two inseparable principles composing all that is. No more inferior nature whose imperfections conceal it from us, and no more superhuman intelligence. Everything is based on states or different degrees of our consciousness itself, and we comprehend it best in what is characteristically human, in reason and the will.229 From this issues the very constitution of Stoic doctrines, and finally the theory of wisdom that, as it were, crowns them. The Peripatetics, attributing to all parts of nature a special character and a particular value, consequently did not neglect any of the branches of science or art. Just as they avoided, in their manners and in their clothing, any hint of rigidity or singularity, so too they happily added to philosophy eloquence, the mistress of public and political life. In contrast, despising all that is the object of opinion, all that is capable merely of probability rather than rigorous certainty, the Stoics remained



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strangers to the art of invention that one names ‘topics’, from which eloquence draws all its resources; affecting a simple elocution in their way of life and in their costume, they knew only, said Cicero, critique, the art of judgement from which issues the art of reasoning, or, according to the Stoic expression, dialectics.230 Thus their excessively concise elocution, a dry and subtle reasoning, advancing only by the syllogism and soritic. Thus also an extreme rigour in deduction, a narrow linking of consequences; thus, finally, the tight weft, the insoluble fabric of their system. Mirabilis est apud illos contextus rerum, said Cicero; respondent extrema primis, media utrisque, omnia omnibus.231 Everything was interconnected in the philosophy of the Stoics, just as all events, for them, are related as successive rings of the chain of Destiny, and just as all the acts of the wise life must be interlinked.232 Everything bore this quality of consistency or of exact conformity with itself, by which they defined reason, and which the energy of this tension or of this effort that was its principle, impressed on reason. Everything bore this quality in their philosophy, because everything in it comes back to reason, because everything in it is reducible to different applications of the rational force. In logic, all knowledge is reduced, by the Stoics, to comprehension, the voluntary operation of reason, and any certainty maintained in the certainty proper to rational demonstration. Beyond this, there is nothing but vain opinions and errors unworthy of wisdom. In physics, all phenomena, in the infinity of their variety, are ultimately reducible to the phenomenon of the tension of ether, at bottom identical with the action of will and reason that is our consciousness itself. In this way, human consciousness issues clarities that will pierce all shadows and dissipate obscurity. Everything becomes reason, everything becomes light for us. In morals, since the good is reducible to the beautiful, everything once again is reducible to reason. This entails that in order to be perfect and happy man needs only himself. It also entails that nothing strange can harm or be useful to him, that man suffices for himself, that he has nothing to ask or want from God. Stoicism seemed to arrive in order to realize the ideal towards which antiquity in its entirety, in some sense, had aimed. To reduce everything to this principle of measure and harmony, regulator of matter, which is humanity itself, to explain thus by man both nature and God, which all pagan religions identified, was a task for which the Greek mind appeared to have been particularly destined: this work, begun by art, came to be completed by science. Moreover, in determining the essence of the principle of harmony and mesure as force and tension, Stoicism came to confirm philosophically the preeminence that Greece always assigned, in religion, just as in the social order, to the virile element. Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Seneca accorded to Stoic philosophy the epithet virile, a)ndrw&dhj, a)ndrwdesta&th, virilis. It can be said, says Seneca, that between the Stoics and the others that make professions of wisdom, there are as many differences as between men and women; Stoici virile

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ingressi viam, he added. And it used to be said, indeed, about Stoic morals that it was made only for men. In the sage who, by his virtue, puts himself above fortune and makes himself equal to the gods, it was possible to see the ideal of man himself, the hero who by his force and courage pacifies the earth and merits Olympus; in a word, the Hercules that the Cynics had already taken as a model, the Hercules who was a severe model for the long preponderant Dorian race, and for Greece as a whole. Finally, the Stoic sage that, associating himself to Destiny through his will, becomes the law of the world and reigns over everything, was this not also the prototype of the people whose idea of empire (imperium) constituted the whole of their genius? The people that, by the august rites of triumph and apotheosis, raised to divine honours the imperator with which it had conquered, and who, imposing his laws on the universe, seemed to be equal to or even surpass the majesty of its gods? Arising from this is the intimate union established between Stoic morals and the Roman character, and from which issued, in turn, and even in decadent times, so many heroic virtues. Only the Stoics, says to us a Roman, seemed worthy of the name of philosophers. The supreme goal that religion allowed man to glimpse, to which previous philosophy had vainly tried to lead – a goal that is nothing less than divinization – only Stoicism, in showing him the true God in his own will, allowed him to attain it. Nevertheless, it seems that sometimes the Stoics recognized the incapacity of man to arrive at perfection without the help of a God. ‘Ask God’, said Epictetus, ‘for help and assistance.’233 And he wants right judgements and desires conforming to nature to be related to God.234 ‘One cannot be good without God,’235 says Seneca. And somewhere else: ‘Who could, without God, rise above fortune? The soul which is superior to everything, maintaining the measure of everything and laughing at all that one fears or desires, could be carried only by a celestial power. Such a great thing could not be maintained without the support of the divinity.’236 Who does not hear in these words Christianity itself? But this God that the Stoics called to the aid of our soul, this is the God that resides in us, it is our demon or genius, in other words, our soul itself considered in its purity and essence; because, say Seneca and Marcus Aurelius: a pure and upright soul is a God in a human body. Animus … rectus, bonus, magnus; quid aliud voces hunc quam Deum in humano corpore hospitantem?237 In truth, if the soul is capable of rising above the mortal condition and of rendering itself absolutely independent of what interests the body, this is because, says Seneca, it comes from heaven, and because, in its principal part, it always resides in this high region from which it has descended. Majore suî parte illic est unde descendit. Just as the beams of the sun come to touch the earth and yet are still in the place from which they descend, so too our soul remains always attached to its celestial origin: hæret origini suæ.238



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But if the soul draws from above its substance and the principle of its force, it is no less true, in the Stoic doctrine, that by its will alone, taking over the government of its being, it becomes the judge of its own destiny, the unique cause of all things good and bad that happen to it. Whence the maxim, the only one conforming to the true spirit of Stoicism, that the secret of wisdom and felicity is to remain content with oneself, to search in the self for the source of joy, and to have an exclusive and absolute confidence in one’s own will. ‘That all your thoughts, that all your desires aim solely at being satisfied with oneself and with the goods that are born in you; for there is no good other than that drawn from oneself alone. There is only one good which is the cause and the guarantee of felicity, and it is to trust in oneself.’239 – ‘The perfectly happy man is he who acknowledges no greater good than that which he can give to himself.’ Elsewhere: ‘Believe that you have arrived at beatitude only when all your joy comes from yourself.’ And finally: ‘True joy is that which is born out of awareness of our virtues.’ Having reached wisdom, it is not only that man has nothing more to demand from God, and nothing to envy in him; but having made himself wise and happy, notwithstanding human frailty, with great effort, he surpasses God by all the distance that separates will from nature. Does one want to know, asks Seneca, what the difference is between gods and the sage? The gods endure longer. But is it not the achievement of the great artist, precisely, to enclose himself in the smallest space? The sage, as he also says, sees the things of this world with no less indifference and contempt than Jupiter, and he values himself more highly, because Jupiter cannot use all these things, whereas he, the sage, does not want to. ‘Endure with courage’, says Seneca, ‘and you will surpass God. God is beyond the reach of evil, you will be above it.’ ‘There is something through which the Sage prevails over God: God owes his wisdom to his nature, not to himself. What a great thing to have, with the frailty of a man, the security of a God!’ – ‘The sage owes to God only his life. Consequently, what we owe to ourselves beats what we owe to the Gods to the same degree as the good life prevails over being alive.’ – ‘No doubt, one will say that the Gods are the authors of philosophy itself.’ – ‘But the Gods gave the capacity for it to everyone, but actual knowledge of it to none; for if they had made a common good of it, and if one were born wise, wisdom would no longer possess what is most eminent in it, which is to be independent of fortune. This is, indeed, what makes wisdom so precious and inestimable: that it does not arrive by fate, that each owes it only to himself, and that it is pointless to ask it from anybody else. What would be so admirable in philosophy if it were something that could be bestowed, res beneficiaria?’240 The belief that, though man owes to the gods both life and the goods of life, he owes virtue only to himself, a belief attacked by Plato and Aristotle, was widely held in Antiquity.

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‘We are praised for our virtue, our virtue is our glory’, says Cicero; ‘it would not have been so, if it were a gift from God and did not come from us.’ – ‘It is the judgment of all the human race that, if one has to ask for good fortune from the gods, wisdom can be drawn only from oneself.’241 ‘What folly it is to ask for what you can give to yourself! One does not have to lift one’s hands to the sky.’242 And again: ‘it is shameful to tire the Gods with one’s own sollicitations! Is there really a need for so many pleas? Make yourself happy by your own lights.’243 ‘It is a belief common to all mortals’, said the academician Cotta, in one of Cicero’s dialogues, ‘that they owe to the gods all the advantages and prosperity of life, but no one ever takes himself to owe God his virtue.’244 Hence a verse from Horace: Hoc satis est orare Jovem, qui donat et aufert, Det vitam, det opes; æquum mî animum ipse parabo.245

This almost universal belief, confirmed by the dogma that virtue, i.e. moral perfection consists in the voluntary effort of reason: this is Stoicism. Who cannot see, notwithstanding the resemblances so often pointed out between the Stoics and Christianity, the profound difference separating them? The Christian is humble as much as the Stoic is superb. The Christian expects everything from God that changes hearts; the Stoic expect something only from himself. However, it is far from the case that this haughty wisdom really maintained itself at the inhuman height that one claimed to take it. Wisdom, as the Stoics define it, is almost impossible. Socrates, Dion, Zeno were not worthy of being called sages. A sage must have existed in the first days of the world, at the time when nature, still young, barely knew corruption and evil; none has been seen since then, and from then on, since there is no mid-point between absolute wisdom and folly, there has been in the world only madmen, or, in other words, the unfortunate and bad. On the other hand, wisdom consisting in nothing but the right choice of offices, if one fulfils them all without omitting any, it is possible, without being wise, to come close to being it such that the distance to it is reduced almost to nothing. From the last degree of the progress towards wisdom (προκοπή) to wisdom itself, the difference is no longer tangible, and one becomes wise though one cannot know it. The wise man of the earliest times was not able to see that he was wise.246 What becomes, therefore, of the sharp dividing line that one hoped to trace between perfect wisdom and everything else? What is a difference that neither reason nor wisdom themselves can discern? Given that wisdom does not have, for the Stoics, any special office separated from the functions of human and social life, not only can it not do without these functions, but, in practice, as the Stoics admit, consciousness itself will not be able to distinguish it from them. Secondly, if the sage despises common opinion, it is nevertheless necessary, for the Stoics, that in the



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practice of life he obey it. The vulgar person is governed by opinion, which focuses on health, reputation and wealth, illness and poverty, as the true goods and evils, while the sage, in order to direct the vulgar and to lead him to his own ends, will offer the same language and conduct. He will talk to the tribune, he will comport itself in the city as if persuaded that wealth and health are goods, and their opposites evils.247 That is what the Stoics call economy, oi0konomi/a, dispensatio. In physics, in order to explain all things by a unique principle, one has to suppose, for the Stoics, that – like a good economist in the administration of a home organizes everything and accommodates all circumstances, dispensing everything according to need – the first principle lowers itself to the condition of inferior beings, and, by condescendence, makes himself everything for everyone. In morals, in order to reconcile with the necessities of human life a rigid wisdom that does not recognize degrees in the good, it is also necessary to admit that, by condescendance and by accommodation, one departs from it into praxis, and that, while remaining loyal to his thought, the sage often talks and acts like the ignorant and the mad. Is this cheating, is this prudent economy not a lie? No, say the Stoics, because the true is always the unique goal of the wise and the constant object of his will: he uses the false but is not himself false for doing that.248 Such is the Stoic theory of economy or accommodation, a theory so much in use and so celebrated since then under this same name or under comparable names (official lie, mental restriction, direction of intention, etc.) But it is not only in order to condescend to the opinions of the vulgar and to direct them to his own ends that the sage talks and acts as if all these things, that the vulgar call good and evil, were to his eyes veritable goods and evils. Without wanting the former, strictly speaking, nor being fearful of the latter, he prefers some, rejects others, and, in his preferences and aversions, he approaches, to the point where the distance is too small to measure, the desires and the fears of the vulgar. Knowing better than anyone else the worth and merit of things, he will do, in order to obtain those preferable over others, what the vulgar would not dare to do. For a good sum of money, for a talent, for example, said Crysippus, ‘the wise man will do, if necessary, three leaps on his head’. In order to arrive at such avowals, was it indeed worthwhile, as Seneca himself said, to be so proud and haughty? Ita sublato alte supercilio, in eadem quæ caeteri descenditis, mutatis nominibus.249 The sage will do even more. In order to avoid what the vulgar names evils, he will even bring about his own death. Be it for his land or for his friends, because of lost limbs or an incurable illness, the sage, says Zeno, has the right to give up his own life. Seneca goes further. ‘If many things happen to the sage that upset him and disturb his tranquillity, he takes leave of himself; he does not wait until he is in extreme need, he leaves as soon as his fortune appears suspect, suspecta.’250 In this way, the sage has to be absolutely indifferent to

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all exterior things: neither illness, nor poverty, nor pain should alter a felicity whose sole source was reason, it was even in the battle against fate that his virtue and invincible force were to shine. And yet, upon fortune’s first assault, or even just from its threats, philosophy authorizes the sage to forego the struggle by taking his own life; life, also indifferent in itself, it is true, but to which belonged the task of impressing by its will and perseverance the divine character of beauty.251 How did it come about that Zeno found himself agreeing, by inviting the sage to suicide, with the Cyrenaics, disciples of Aristippus? The Cyrenaic, say the Stoics, take his leave of life due to fear of pain, which seems to them bad; the sage leaves life due to an aversion to a disorder, that, without being bad, comes nevertheless to disturb its functions and prevent what is fitting from being realized. Life is the matter of virtue and wisdom, subjecta quasi materia sapientiæ, a matter indifferent in itself. As soon as too great a disorder introduces itself into life, or threatens to introduce itself there, as soon as there is or probably will be in life more things contrary to nature than conforming to it, as soon as it becomes impossible for us to fulfil the offices prescribed by nature, wisdom counsels us to renounce life. This is like shedding, says Seneca, an item of clothing that is uncomfortable or no longer fits. The sage, perfectly happy by the very fact that he is wise, can therefore have good grounds for leaving life, if life is not such as nature wants it to be; the madman, wholly miserable due to his madness, can have reason for continuing to live, if he lives according to nature, fulfilling regularly the offices of man; for, says Crysippus, it is not by the good or the bad, but by conformity and non-conformity to nature that life and death are evaluated.252 It might be asked whether leaving life amounts, for the wise, to renouncing his opportunities to do good, while, for the mad and the bad, continuing to live amounts to preserving the opportunity to do bad? The Stoic would respond that time has nothing to do with either virtue or vice, and that the probable longevity of life does not entail that the wise or the mad should conserve it or rid themselves of it. But wisdom being impossible without life, is it not at least true that to conserve life is to renounce wisdom itself? The Stoic affirms this. It is wisdom itself, says he, that dictates to us, if life cannot be as it should be, to relinquish wisdom, a sapientia præcipitur se ipsam sapiens ut relinquat. ‘If ’, says Chrisippus, ‘Circe the magician proposed to the wise Ulysses two beverages, of which one had the property of driving men mad, and the other that of changing him into an ass, Ulysses would have to drink the cup of folly rather than consent, even while preserving his wisdom, and thus his felicity, to adopt such a figure. Wisdom itself would have cried to him: let me perish rather than hide me under the figure of a ass.’253 It is therefore not solely life itself that wisdom counsels man to renounce, rather than to suffer illness, pain or deformity; it is wisdom, it is virtue, and the divine joy inseparable from it. Called to choose between vice or folly, with a life of which



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nothing would hinder its natural development, and a wise life troubled by one of these circumstances that the wise takes as indifferent, it is madness, vice that the wise will choose. This is a conclusion which conforms to the spirit of antiquity, and particularly to that of Greece, which was reluctant to separate intellectual and moral perfection from that of physical life and the body; a conclusion to which the haughty wisdom of Stoicism, which nevertheless aspired to be entirely self-sufficient, is inevitably led. Indeed, once it is reduced to the order of natural and instinctive functions onwards, it is vain to distinguish virtue from these functions themselves; as soon as order is lacking in the functions and the life they compose, virtue itself is no longer possible. In abandoning the superior principle on which the philosophies of Pythagoras, of Plato and of Aristotle wholly depended, the Stoic makes himself dependent on an inferior element, which it pretends to dominate; separated from the source from which all its force derives, the will can now only obey instinct, and reason the senses. Given that simple being, which in order to exist needs only itself, is eliminated, everything is reducible to what cannot subsist by itself, to material multiplicity. According to the Stoics, the sole cause maintaining the unity of body is itself a body. Being multiple and extended, whence derives its unity? One would have to go from body to body in the pursuit of a primary unity without ever reaching a stop. It may be suggested that unity derives not from the Ether itself, but rather from its manner of being, which is tension. Yet is tension itself incorporeal? If so, the incorporeal is the primary cause, and not a body. Metaphysics thus becomes the supreme science, and not, as the Stoics say, physics. Or is tension, on the contrary, in itself a body, as the Stoics indeed supposed? It would have to obtain its unity from somewhere else; and, consequently, like the body it unites, it is always nothing but an effect.254 Also, in the last of the Stoics whose work has been transmitted to us, the theory that bases all force and all virtue on tension seems to have fallen into oblivion; Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius do not make use of or even mention it. For Marcus Aurelius, for Epictetus, for Seneca himself, and probably before him for Posidonius, cause, nature, soul or god, is no longer tension or effort, the object of sensation and consciousness: it is a je ne sais quoi that makes itself known by its effects, which, consequently, escape the senses, and that reason alone can reach. Forced by reason always to go beyond the phenomena falling under the senses to a prior cause of unity, while refusing to recognize as real the entirely simple unity of what is purely intelligible, the Stoic stops halfway, with an idea of an unknown cause, which is material and extended, and at the same time one and indivisible, a cause that thus reunites, thanks to its obscurity, the irreconcilable attributes of the corporeal and the incorporeal. Such was the theory that, passing from the Stoic school into general beliefs, constituted, at the beginnings of the Christian era, the system named dogmatism, and that scepticism and empiricism were easily to overturn.

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Moreover, in the last Stoics, there is barely a question of the knowledge of causes, there is barely a question of the nature of God, of the nature of the destiny of the soul; physics, the science of principles, is restricted more and more to the detail of sensible phenomena and the rest of philosophy is gradually reduced to morals. In logic, Stoicism has wanted, without having recourse to a principle of knowledge superior to man, to escape from scepticism, the inevitable consequence of the systems that sought only in sensation the criterion of truth. It claimed to find in right reason the rule of truth and the source of certitude. But if there is nothing real other than body, if, consequently, reason itself is a sense, mens ipsa sensus est, whence could it gain the means to judge sensations, if not from sensations themselves? Reason judges sensations, for the Stoics, by measuring them by tension alone; but it is through sensation that reason becomes aware of this tension, a corporeal and sensory phenomenon. Just as for the cause, if it is supposed to consist in tension, it is necessary to seek another, anterior cause, so too, for a rule placed in the tension, it is necessary to search once more for an anterior rule, and then for this rule another, and thus to pursue ad infinitum the criterion of the true. From this arose the controversy that was successfully maintained against Stoicism by the sceptics of the new Academy; from this the demonstrations they gave that it is impossible, with the principles of Stoicism, ever to arrive at perfect comprehension, which is the only ground of an infallible science. On the contrary, we have to make do with the testimony of the senses, on the basis of appearances, and to be satisfied with probabilities.255 Finally, in morals, refusing to follow Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian metaphysics up to the idea of a good that surpasses anything sensory and multiple, Stoicism had the good consist in the harmony of parts in accord, in the consistency by which it defines beauty. This entails that the good – since consistency is the effect and the sign of a will always in conformity with itself – has to be defined as constant and consistent will. But given that the will, as the Stoics understood it, is a multiple and successive act, just as tension requires a singular and indivisible act from which it proceeds, so too will implies an indivisible goal towards which it aims, a unity to which its constancy is related and on which it depends. If this unity, this superior goal is impossible, as the Stoics supposed, then just as anticipation or the idea is reduced to the order of sensation, so too will is reduced to the order of instincts and is indistinguishable from them. Virtue had to be the rule of life, and only in this rule is true good to be found; and, finally, virtue takes its rule from these appetencies, from which are born the involuntary functions of life; law thus submits to fact, will to instinct, reason to nature.256 Thus if these purely natural functions, the matter of virtue and wisdom, come to be temporarily troubled or interfered with, virtue renounces itself; wisdom will prefer to be extinguished in folly, vice and misery than to be associated to an ill or deformed body. In other words, the superb virtue and wisdom of Zeno



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and Cleanthes, when delivered over to itself and deprived of a matter permitting it, serving as its basis, extension and form, is reduced to acknowledging its own impotence and nullity. It is clear that thereafter Stoic philosophy, forgetting its primary ambition, fell back into increasingly narrow limits. Seneca says somewhere, with his predecessors, that knowledge of the primary causes is the greatest prize of philosophy, and even of life; and somewhere else, he proclaims that knowledge of the causes is above human intelligence. ‘Man’, he says, ‘is not made in order to know the true.’ And if he despairs of science, he despairs no less of virtue. The first Stoics themselves had said, as we have seen above, that a wise person is almost impossible to find; there is barely even a single one in any great period of universal life. Seneca, who elevates the wise above God, declares perfect wisdom impossible: there is none, he says, that can entirely triumph over natural vices. Nulla enim sapientia naturalia corporis aut animi vitia ponuntur; quidquid intimum et ingenitum est lenitur arte, non vincitur.257 Epictetus does not believe, like his predecessors, that our sensations and our visions are the effects of our consent, the work of our will; one thing alone, for him, is in our power: the good or bad usage of visions. Stoic philosophy wanted to subsume the whole of nature to the law of will and reason, and consequently subject it to man: the foundation of the philosophy of Epictetus is the distinction between what depends on us and what does not; and what depends on us is, for him, the will. Seneca himself, faithful on this point to the tradition of Zeno and of Chrysippus, saw in human organization as a whole a development of the moral principle, an extension of its life. Epictetus defined man as ‘a soul that drags with it death’. Separated thus from everything, the moral principle has only, following Epictetus, itself as a goal. The predecessors of Epictetus gave to the will the goals of harmony and beauty; Epictetus assigns to the will no other goal but will itself. Will or freedom is man; what is good in man is that in the use of his visions there remains will and freedom.258 Until then, the Stoic aspired to domination; now, as the Epicurean, he demands nothing more than independence. Hence these two entirely negative precepts that summarize Epictetus’ whole morality: to bear and to abstain. Placed at the head of an empire that seems to realize Zeno’s wish, in making a city of the universe, one subject to the same law, Marcus Aurelius wants all acts to be directed towards the common good.259 As a consequence, the idea of the unity of the world, of the narrow solidarity that binds all the parts within it, seems, first of all, to have in his meditations as important a place as it could ever have occupied in the thoughts of Zeno. But, for the founders of Stoicism, the world was primarily a grand order, a harmonious system whose ground links all its members: Marcus

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Aurelius prefers to picture it as a rapid river in which as soon as something appears it is carried away.260 In human life, the ancient Stoics saw above all a regular succession of functions, in which reason learns to know the harmony – that is to say, the good – that it can always justify: for Marcus Aurelius, the eminent character of human life is that it is filled with goods and ills whose measure is only opinion, in such a way that for him, as for the Sceptics, from whom he borrows his expressions, the world is nothing but change and life is but opinion. Although the Stoics said that duration adds nothing to perfection, and that the shortest life, in this regard, merits no less than the longest, nevertheless, given that the proper function of reason consists in the linking of the past and future, by a heightened and developed tension, in the very idea of reason and virtue there was necessarily contained the idea of duration. According to Marcus Aurelius, past and future are nothing at all; everything consists for us in the present, in the moment that passes; in living we occupy no more than an instant; in dying, we lose only one moment, the one itself where death comes to seize us. When life is thus abstracted from duration, can the principle from which it proceeds remain mixed with extension, as Stoicism wanted it to be? Stoicism supposed intelligence to consist in ether, or in spirit; Marcus Aurelius gives only to the soul, the source of animal life, the name of spirit or aeriform body.261 He distinguishes spirit from that which thinks and that which senses.262 Yet without avowing it, without avowing it to himself, he acknowledged in this way simplicity and incorporeality as essential to intelligence. Stoicism thus comes to the end of its career; the moment arrives when it is going to be lost in the new doctrines beginning to carve up the world, which also invoke a cause superior to man and to nature, namely Neoplatonism and the Christian religion. In summary, Stoic philosophy holds to these two principles: that everything in nature has its cause, its reason, and that there is no cause separate from nature. In order to explain things, in order to secure what is good for man, it had both the principle of any movement and the goal of any desire reside in energy, tensed at the heart of matter, a voluntary and intelligent energy whose perfection is reason. Hence the doctrine, which seems to be no more than an intricate web of paradoxes, and which, indeed, is as a whole reducible to a single proposition, from which everything else follows with an irresistible necessity: that all beings, of whatever kind, nature, man or God, are reducible to different forms of the same principle, to different degrees of tension or of relaxation of an animated fluid, ether and reason all at once, and that, outside of this principle, above or below it, there is nothing true or good. But in order to grant unity to a material principle, one extended and multiple, an anterior principle possessing unity in itself is necessary. Consequently, either the cause, defined by tension alone, is collapsed into corporeal phenomena – and thus



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virtue with instinct, reason with sense – and then from Stoicism one descends to Epicurean philosophy, to the philosophy of passive matter, of inertia and of chance; or, on the contrary, the cause is nothing other than the effect and the sensible manifestation of a superior cause, and therefore it is necessary to return from matter to the immaterial, from the region of the senses to that of pure intelligence, to reascend from Stoic physics to metaphysics.

Notes 1. Aristotle, Metaphysica XIV, 3. 2. Aristotle, Metaphysica I, 7; XIV, 6: 0Enede/xeto/ te ta\ diafe/ronta u9po\ to\n au0to\n a0riqmo\n piptein. 9Wste ei1 tisin o( a!riqmoj sunebebh/kei, tauta\ a1n h]n a)llh/loij e0kei=na to\ au0to\ ei]doj a0riqmou= e1xonta, oi3on h3lioj kai selh/nh ta_ au)ta/. 3. Metaphysica I, 6. 4. Metaphysica XI, 9. 5. Metaphysica XII, 7. 6. Aristotle, Metaphysica I. 7. Stobaeus, Eclogae, Physicae et Ethicae I, p. 348: Kinei=sqai de\ kat’a)llhlotupi/ an e0n tw|~ a)pei/rw|. Simplicius in Physicae, fol. 96: Dhmo/kritoj fu/sei a0ki/nhta le/gwn ta_ a!toma, plhgh|~ kinei=sqai fhsin. 8. Lucretius, I, II, v. 221, 292. 9. Diogenes Laertius IX, 45. 10. ‘Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor.’ – Servius defined religion by fear, see Æneid, VIII, p. 1319: ‘Religio, id est meius, ab eo quod mentem religet dicta religio.’ See Æneid, II, p. 653: ‘Connexa enim sunt metus et religio.’ – Florus, I, 8: ‘Ita res poposcit, ut ferox populus deorum metu mitigaretur.’ 11. Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, I, 21: ‘Soleo sæpe mirari nonnullorum insolentiam philosophorum, qui naturæ cognitionem admirantur, ejusque inventori et principi gratias exultantes agunt, eumque venerantur ut Deum: liberatos enim se per eum dicunt gravissimis dominis, terrore sempiterno et diurno ac nocturne metu.’ 12. [‘Swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us.’] 13. [‘What keeps the mind itself from having necessity, Within it in all actions, and from being as it were mastered and forced to endure and to suffer, Is the minute swerving of the first-beginnings, At no fixed place and at no fixed time.’] 14. [‘This will wrested from the fates, By which we proceed whither pleasure leads each.’] 15. Lucretius, 1, I, v. 79: ‘Quare relligio pedibus subjecta vicissim, Obteritur, nos exæquat Victoria cœlo’; v. 930: ‘… Ex arctis Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo.’

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16. Leibniz, in speaking of atomist philosophy, renewed by Gassendi and by the Cartesians: ‘Philosophiæ novæ, inertiam rerum et torporem inducentis’ (De ipsa natura, ed. Erdman, p. 156). 17. Cleanthes, Hymn apud Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 32: Oi9 me\n u(per do/chj spoudh\n duse/riston e1xontej 3Alloi d’e0j a!nesin kai\ sw&matoj h3dea e1rga, k.t.l. The Stoics defined pleasure by relaxation. Diogenes Laertius VII, 114: Te/ryij de\ oi1on tre/yij, protroph\ th=j yuxh=j e0pi to\ a)neime/non. 18. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 44: ‘Mihi enim qui nihil agit esse omnino non videtur.’ 19. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, o’, f. 2a. 20. Diogenes Laertius VII, 134: Dokei= d’au0toi=j a)rxa\j ei]nai tw~n o3lwn du/o, to\ poiou~n kai\ to\ pa/sxon: to\ me\n ou]n pa/sxon ei]nai th\n a!poion ou)si/an th\n u3lhn, k.t.l. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 65; Plutarch, Placita Philosophorum. I, 3; Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos, IX, 11; Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, 2; Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, v’, f. 5b. According to a passage from Cicero, the Stoics call all bodies qualities (Academica, I, 7): ‘Quod ex utroque (sc. materia et vi), id jam corpus et quasi qualitatem quandam nominabant.’ Nevertheless he says a little further on: ‘Et cum ita moveatur illa vis, quam qualitatem esse diximus … illa effici quae appellant qualia.’ Expressions which lead to the Stoics giving to body in general the title of poia/, and to forces or causes, that of poio/thtej. 21. Cicero, Academica, I, 6. 22. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 43: Ou)de\n a!llo ta_j e3ceij plh~n a)e/raj ei]nai/ fhsin. Ta_j de\ poio/thtaj pneu/mata ou1saj kai to/nouj ae0rw&deij. Ta\j de\ poio&thtaj au] pa/lin ou)siaj kai\ sw&mata poiou~si. Cicero, Academica. I, 12: ‘Nec vero aut quod efficeret aliquid aut quod efficeretur posse esse non corpus.’ 23. Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 328: Tosou/tw| me\n ou]n diafe/rein to\ ei]doj th~j morfh~j, o3ti to\ me/n e0sti dih~kon dia_ ba&qouj, h9 d’e0pipolai/wj. 24. Whence all the typically Stoic expressions in their applications to the active cause: sune/xein on the one hand, dih/kein, diaxorei=n, diaqei=n, diafoita~n, diatei/nein, on the other. Alexander Aphrodisias, De Mexitione, p. 141; Diogenes Laertius VII, 38; Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, c. 2; Clemens Alexandrinus, Protrepticus and Stromata ap. Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, IV, 40. Cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum I, 14; II, 9, 54, 55; Stobaeus Eclogae, I, p. 376: Sw~ma dia_ sw&matoj a0ntiparh/kein. – Tw~n swma&twn a0ntipare/ktasin, p .273: Sw&matoj o3lou di/ o3lou e9te/rou tino\j dierxome/nou. Alexexander Aphrodisias, De Mexitione, p. 141; Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 37, 45. Diogenes Laertius VII, 151: Ta\j kra/seij de\ di 0 o3lou gi/nesqai, kaq 0 a1 fhsin o( Xru/sippoj e0n th|~ tri/ph| tw~n fusikw~n, kai\ mh\ kata_ perigrafh\n kai\ para&qesin. 25. Diogenes Laertius VII, 136, 148; Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I, 7; Marcus Antoninus, IV, 14, 120; Cleanthes ap. Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 372; Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, III, 29. 26. Diogenes Laertius VII, 159; Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, V, 3; Valerii Sorani



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ap. Augustin, De Civitate Dei, VII, 9; Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 41; Placita philosophorum V, 15; Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum III, 6. 27. Damascus ap. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, I, p. 448: 0Arseno/qhlun au0te\n (sc. th\n ai0ti/an) u0pesth/santo pro\j e1ndeicin th\j pa/ ntwn gennhtikh~j ou0si/aj. Valerii Sorani ap. Augustin, De Civitate Dei, VII, 9. 28. Cicero, Academica, I, 8: ‘E quibus (sc. elementis) aer et ignis movendi vim habent et efficiendi; reliquæ partes, accipiendi et quasi patiendi, aquam dico et terram.’ Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, 5: De/gousi de\ oi9 Stwoikoi tw~n stoixei/wn ta\ me\n ei]nai drastika\, ta_ de\ paqhtika/: drastika\ me\n a0e/ra kai\ pu~r, paqhtika\ de\ gh~n kai\ u1dwr. 29. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 49; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I. II. 30. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 9: ‘Omne igitur quod vivit … id vivit propter inclusum in eo calorem. Ex quo intelligi debet eam caloris naturam vim habere in se vitalem per omnem mundum pertinentem. Omnes igitur partes mundi … caloræ fultæ sustinentur.’ III, 14: ‘Omnem vim esse ignem; itaque et animantes, cum calor defecerit, tum iterire, et in omni natura rerum id vivere, id vigere, quod caleat.’ 31. Diogenes Laertius VII, 137, 148, 156: pu~r texniko\n, o9dw|~ badi/zon ei0j ge/nesin. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I, 7; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 11, 15, 22, 32. See also Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, I, 9. 32. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I, 6, 7; Cicero, De Finibus bonorum et malorum, IV, 5; De Natura Deorum, I, 14, 15; Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 372. 33. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 49: 0Ae/ra de/ kai\ pu~r au)tw~n t’ei]nai di’eu0toni/an e9ktatika, kai\ toi=j dusi\n e0kei/noij e0gkekrame/na to/non pare/xein kai\ to\ mo/nimon kai\ ou0siw~dej. 34. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, ό f. 3b: To\ a)tele\j e0pi th~j kinh/sewj ei0rh~sqai, ou0x o3ti ou0k e1stin e0ne/rgeia, e1sti ga_r pa_ntwj, fasi/n, e0ne/rgeia, a)lla’e1xei to\ pa&lin kai\ pa&lin, ou0x i3na a0fi/khtai ei0j e0ne/rgeian, e1sti ga_r h3dh, a0ll’i3na e0rga/shtai/ pou e3teron, o3 e0sti met’au0th/n. 35. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 7: Plh/gh pro\j to/noj e0sti. Plh/gh puro/j means here the impulsive force of fire. 36. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, II, 6. 37. [‘The back-stretched harmony of the world, like that of the bow or the lyre’; Heraclitus, fragment 51.] Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 45. In Origenes, Philosophum, IX, 9, instead of pali/ntonoj there is pali/ntropoj. Plato, Convivium, p. 187c: To\ e4n ga_r fhsi diafero/menon au0to\ au0tw|~ cumfe/resqai, w#sper a9rmoni/an to/cou te kai\ lu/raj. For the meaning of pali/ntonoj, see Scholia Homer, Iliad, Θ, 266. 38. Antonius Melissa, II, 45. See Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus IV, §26. 39. Johan Conrad von Orelli, Opuscula Graecorum veterum sententiosa et moralia; Justus Lipsius, 1821, II, p. 328. Cf. Demophilus, Similitudines seu uitae curatio, 4: Ibid. t. I, p. 4. 40. [‘Apollo is not always straining the bow.’] In the same sense Horace says also: ‘Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem, Dulce est desipere in loco.’

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41. Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, V, p. 599 B; Diogenes Laertius IX, 7–9. 42. Proclus, in Timaeus, p. 101: 1Alloi de\ kai\ to\n dhmiourgo\n e0n tw|~ kosmourgei=n pai/zein ei0rh/kasi, kaqa/per 9Hraklei=toj. 43. Diogenes Laertius IX, 7; Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, V, p. 599. 44. Politica VIII, 2 [1337b35]: ‘H de\ paidia\ xa/rin a0napau/sew&j e0sti: to\ d’a) sxolei=n sumbai/nei meta\ po/nou kai\ suntoni/aj: dia_ tou~to dei= paidia\j ei0sa/ gesqai kairofulakou~ntaj th\n xrh~sin, w(j prosa/gontaj farmakei/aj xa/rin: a!nesij ga\r h9 toiau/th ki/nhsij th~j yuxh~j, kai\ dia_ th\n h(donh\n a) papausis. Cf. Ethica Nicomachea X, 6. 45. [‘You will soon break your bow if you keep it always bent; but if you unbend it, it will be ready to use when you want it. So it is. You should let your mind play now and then, that it may be better fitted for thinking when it resumes its work.’] 46. Diogenes Laertius VI, 2, 13; Plutarch, in Themistocles, c. I; Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, IV, 9; St. Augustin, De Civitate Dei, XIV, 20. 47. Diogenes Laertius VI, 2, 71, 104; Stobaeus, Sermones, XXIX, 65; Crates, Epistulae, 2. 48. Stobaeus, Sermones, VII, 18; cf. XXIX, 92. 49. Euripides said more or less the same: Oi9 po/noi ti/ktousi th\n eu0andri/an, ap. Stobaeus, Sermones, XXIX, 32; cf. Ibid. 5, 14, 22, 23, 34, 44. Pythagoras: Ta\ e0pi/ pona tw~n h9de/wn ma~llon h9gou~ suntelei=n ei0j a0reth/n. Ibid. I, 26; cf. XVII, 8. 50. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhhoniae Hypotyposes, III, 39, 45. 51. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, v, f. 3b: To\ sxh~ma oi9 Stwi/koi th\n ta/sin pare/xesqai le/gousin, w#sper kai\ th\n metacu\ tw~n shmeiw&n dia&stasin: dio\ kai\ eu0qei=an o(rizontai grammh\n th\n ei0j a!kron tetame/nhn. 52. [‘Virtue also is straight, and admits of no bending. What can be made tenser than a thing which is already rigid? Such is virtue, which passes judgement on everything, but nothing passes judgement on virtue. And if this rule, virtue, cannot itself be made more straight.’] Seneca, Epistolae morales, 71. The relations of ideas expressed by tenor and rigor are also indicated in this passage by Pliny (VII, 19): ‘Exit hic animi tenor aliquando in rigorem quemdam torvitatemque naturæ duram et inflexibilem.’ 53. In the agrimensores. 54. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 2: ‘Numquid dubium est quin ex his corporibus quæ videmus tractamusque, quæ aut sentiuntur aut sentiunt, quædam sint composita? Illa constant aut nexu aut acervatione, ut puta funis, frumentum, navis; rursus non composita, ut arbor, lapis … Expedire me poteram, si philosophorum lingua uti voluissem, ut dicerem unita corpora … Si quando dixero unum, memineris me non ad numerum referre, sed ad naturam corporis, nulla ope externa sed unitate sua cohærentis.’ – Unita is the translation of the Greek h9nwme/na. Sextus Empiricus, adversus Physicos I, 2: Tw~n swma&twn ta\ me/n e0stin h9nwme/na, ta\ de\ e0k sunaptome/nwn, k.t.l. See Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, VII, 13. 55. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 6. 56. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 6.



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57. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 8. 58. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 8, 9. 59. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, I, 8, 9. 60. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnatiis, 7. In their physical theology, or religion explained by physics, the Stoics represented Hercules as the fire that beats and divides, to\ plhktiko\n kai\ diairetko/n (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 41). The same idea is found in this passage attributed to Heraclides of Pont (in Gale, Opuscula Mythologica, p. 454): To\n tolero\n a0e/ra kai\ peri\ th~j e0ka/stou dia/ noiaj e0paxlu/onta prw~toj ‘Hraklh=j qeiw| xrhjsa/menoj lo/gw| dih/rqrwse, th\n e9ka/stou tw~n a0nqrw&pwn a)maqian pollaij nouqesi/aij katatrw&saj. Finally, the last passage may be close to what Philon and St Paul later said about the division operated by the Verb. 61. Censorinus, De Die Natali. 62. Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, 2. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, v’ f. 5b: Oi9 de\ Stwi=koi\ d/unamin h9 ma/llon ki/nhsin th\n manwtikh\n kai\ puknwtikh\n ti/qentai, th\n me\n e0ti ta\ e0sw th\n de\ e0pi ta\ e1cw, kai\ th\n me\n tou~ ei]nai th\n de\ tou@ poio\n ei]nai nomi/zousin ai0ti/an. Rarefication is the effect of heat, condensation the effect of cold. Hence the cold that the soul feels, when at the moment of birth, it senses the first impressions of air, is that which, in condensing the soul, makes it take on a consistency that is the basis of its individuality. Hence the name yuxh/ (from yu~xoj, cold). Tertullian also said (De Anima, 9) that the human soul is a condensed divine breath. ‘Inde igitur et corpulentia animæ ex densatione solidata est.’ (See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia Stoicorum III, 13). 63. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 49: 0Ae/ra de\ kai\ pu~r au9tw~n t’ei]nai di’eu0toni/an e0kktatika_, kai\ toi=j dusi\n e0kei/noij e0gkekrame/na to/non pare/xein kai to\ mo\ nimon kaiz ou0siw~dej. Ibid., 43: Ou0de\n a!llo ta\j e3ceij ple\n a0e/raj ei]nai fhsin (sc. o9 Xru/sippoj): u9po\ tou/twn ga\r sune/xetai ta\ sw&mata: kai\ tou~ poi\on e3kaston ei]nai tw~n e3cei sunexome/nwn ai1tioj o9 sune/xwn a)h/r e0stin, o1n sklhro/thta me\n e0n sidh/rw|, pukno/thta d’e0n li/qw|, leuko/nta d’e0n a0rgu/rw| kalou~si…Ta\j de\ poio/thtaj pneu/mata ou1saj kai\ to/nouj a0erw&deij, oi[j a2n e0gge/nwntai me/resi th\j u1lhj, ei0dopoiei~n e3kasta kai\ sxhmati/zein. 64. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, x’ f. 6b: 0Epi\ tw~n h(nwme/nwn mo/nwn e0kta\ a0polei/pousin, e0pi de\\ tw~n kata_ sunafh\n, oi]on new_j, kai\ e0pi\ tw~n kata_ dia&stasin, oi]on stra&ton, mhde\n ei]nai e0ktu\n mhde\ eu)ri/skesqai pneumatiko/n ti e1n e0p’au0twn. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos IX, 81: Tw~n h9nome/nwn soma&twn ta\ me0n u(po\ yilh\j e3cewj sune/xetai, w(j li/qoi kai\ cu/la, ta_ de\ u(po\ fu/sewj, kata/per ta\ futa_, ta_ de\ u(po\ yuxh~j, ta\ zw~a. Achilles Tatius, Isagoge in Arati phaenomena, 14: 0Esti de e3cij pneu~ma sw&matoj sunektiko/n. Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, 2, talks about the Platonists: Zh~n me\n le/gousi kai\ pa&nta a!yuxa e0ktikh\n zwh\n, kaq’ o( sune/xetai u9po\ th\j tou~ panto\j yuxh~j, tw|~ ei]nai kai\ mh/ dialu/esqai. (Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, VI, 14.) Augustin, De Civitate Dei, VII, 23: ‘Varro … tres esse affirmat animæ gradus in omni universaque natura: unum qui omnes corporis partes quæ vivunt transit, et non habet sensum, sed tantum ad vivendum valetudinem; hanc vim in

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nostro corpore permanare dicit in ossa, ungues, capillos, sicut in mundo arbores sine sensu aluntur et crescunt, et modo quodam suo vivunt, etc.’ (Cf. Philo in Gataker loc. laud., and Diogenes Laertius VII, 138.) 65. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, II, 7. 66. Diogenes Laertius, ap. Salmasius ad Epictetus, p. 123. 67. De Anima, III, 2. 68. Plutarch, De Placita Philosophorum, IV, 8. Ibid. IV, 21: 0Apo\ de\ tou~ h(gemonikou~ e9pta\ me/rh ei0si th~j yuxh~j e0kpefuko/ta kai\ e0kteino/mena ei0j to\ sw~ma. Diogenes Laertius VII, 52: Ai1sqhsij de\ le/getai kata\ tou/j Stwikou/j to/ te a0f’h9gemonikou~ pneu~ma kai\ e0pi ta\j ai0sqh/seij dih~kon, k.t.l. Cf. 159. 69. Cicero, De Divinatione II, 58: ‘Contrahi autem animum Zeno et quasi labi putat atque concidere, et ipsum esse dormire.’ Diogenes Laertius VII, 158: to\n de\ u3pnon gi/nesqai e0kluome/nou tou~ ai0sqhtikou~ to/nou peri\ to\ h9gemoniko/n. Plutarch, Placita Philosophorum, V, 23: To\n me\n u1pnon gi/nesqai a0ne/sei tou~ ai0sqhtikou~ pneu/matoj. 1Anesij kai\ e1klusij tou~ ai0sqhtikou~ pneu/matoj, qa&natoj. 70. Diogenes Laertius VII, 50. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, IV, 12; Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos VII, 228; Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes, II, 7; III, 5. 71. Cicero, Academica, I, 12. 72. Cicero, Ibid. 33: ‘Sensus ipsos assensus esse.’ Stobaeus, Sermones, Append. XX 15, 17: Oi9 Stwi=koi pa~san ai1sqhsin ei]nai sugkata&qesin kai\ kata/lhyin. 73. Simplicius, in Epictetus, Manual, 1. 74. Diogenes Laertius VII, 114. Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, iv, Suid, νν. Eu0pa/qeia, h9donh\, xa/ra. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, 1, IV, ap. Salmasius, ad Epictetus, 60: Ou0 ta\j kri/seij au0ta_j th~j yuxh~j, a0lla\ ta\j e0pi tau/taij a)lo/gouj sustola_j kai\ tapeinw&seij kai\ dei/ceij e0pa/rseij te kai\ diaxu/seij u9polamba/nousin ei]nai ta_ th~j yuxh~j pa/qh. Instead of dei/ ceij, Salmasius proposes dh/ceij; perhaps one should read ph/ceij (Chrysippus in Stobaeus, Sermones, CIII, 22: 3Otan ai9 me/sai pra&ceij au[tai prosla/bwsi to\ be/baion kai\ e9ktiko\n kai\ i0di/an ph~ci/n tina la/bwsin), or even better ei1ceij, from ei1kw. 75. Diogenes Laertius VII, 114. 76. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, II, p. 61: Xru/sippoj me\n ou] n e0n tw|~ prw&tw| peri\ pa/qwn a)podeikn/unai peira~tai kri/seij tina\j ein] ai tou~ logistikou~ ta_ pa&qh. Zh/nwn de\ ou) ta\j kri/seij au0taj, a0lla\ ta\j e0piginome/naj au0tai=j sustola_j kai\ lu/seij e0pa/gseij te kai\ ptw&seij th~j yuxh~j e0no/mizen ei]nai ta\ pa/qh. 77. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, III, 11. 78. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, II, p. 91. 79. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, II, p. 89: Kai\ to\ e0gw_ le/gomen kata\ tou~to. 80. Diogenes Laertius VII, 85. 81. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, IV, 12. 82. Academica, I, 11.



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83. Adversus Mathematicos, VII, 257. Ibid. 158: Tranh\n kai\ plhktikh\n fantasi/an. Cicero, Academica, II, 10: ‘Quemadmodum nos visa pellerent.’ Cf. Plotinus, Enneades, IV, 1, vi, 2. 84. Adversus Mathematicos, VII, 408. 85. Academica, II, 10. 86. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, IV, 11; De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 17; Diogenes Laertius VII, 51, 53, 54. 87. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 128. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotypses, III, 188, 241, 251, 261; Adversus Mathematicos, II, 10. 88. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 130: 3Ecin fantasi/wn dektikh\n a0meta&ptwton u(po lo/gou, h1ntina& fasin e0n to/nw| kai\ duna/mei kei=sqai. Cicero, Academica, II, 11. 89. Cicero, Eclogae, v. II, p. 128. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, VII, 152; Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes III, 241. 90. Cicero, Academica, II, 47. Zeno also compared Rhetoric to the open hand and dialectics to a closed fist. ‘Rhetoricam palmæ, dialecticam pugno simile esse dicebat, quod latius loquerentur rhetores, dialectici autme compressius.’ 91. Cicero, De Officiis, I, 4. Prudence, the virtue proper to reason consists: ‘In perspiciendo quid in quaque re verum sincerumque sit, quid consentaneum cuique quid consequens, ex quo quidque gignatur, quæ cujusque rei causa sit.’ Cf. II, 6. 92. Cicero, De Finibus, ΙΙ, 14: ‘Mentem … quæ et causas rerum et consecutiones videat et similitudines transferat, et disjuncta conjungat, cum præsentibus futura copulet omnemque complectatur vitæ consequentis statum.’ 93. Diogenes Laertius X, 31, 33. 94. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 120: ‘Hoc (sc. bonum honestumque) nos docere naturam non potuisse, sed nobis videtur observatio collegisse, et rerum sæpe factarum inter se collatio.’ Origen, Contra Celsus, VII, 37: Pa~san kata/lhyin h9rth~sqai tw~n ai0sqhsewn. 95. Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 332: Zh/nwn ta\ e0nnoh/mata fhsi me/te poia&. – Ta\j i0de/aj … a0nuparktou/j ei]nai. Simplicius, in Aristotelis Categorias, fol. 26, b: Ou1 tina ta_ koina&. The tina and the poia& form the two primary categories of the Stoa, and they are the only ones that entail realities; the other categories are reduced, according to them, to pro/j ti and pro/j ti/ pwj e1xonta. 96. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, IV, 11: Tw~n e0nnoi/wn fusikw~j ginontai kai\ a0nepitexnh/twj, ai9 d’h1dh di’ h9mete/raj didaskali/aj h( e0pimelei/as. Au1tai me\n ou]n e1nnoiai kalou~tai mo/nai, e0kei~nai de\ kai\ prolh/yeij. De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 17: 0Emfu/twn prolh/yewn. Diogenes Laertius VII, 51, 53, 54: e1sti d’h( pro/lhyij e0nnoia fusikh\ tw~n kaqo/lou. 97. Cicero, De Legibus, I, 10. 98. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 95. 99. Cicero, Topica, 31. 100. See especially Meno. 101. Cicero, Academica, I, 10: ‘Mens … quæ sensuum fons est, atque ipsa sensus

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est.’ Also all the affections of the soul, like the vices and the virtues themselves, are sensibles. Crysippus according to Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 19: o1ti me\n ai0sqhta& e0sti ta)gaqa_ kai\ ta_ kaka\ tou/toij e0kpoiei= le/gein:…ou0de\ mo/non xara~j kai\ eu0ergesiw~n kai\ a!llwn pollwn katorqw&sewn (sc. e0stin ai0sqe/sqai), a0lla_ pronh/sewj kai\ a0ndrei/aj kai\ tw~n loipw~n a0retw~n.   ὄτι μὲν αἰσθητά ἐσϑι τἀγαθὰ καὶ κακὰ τούτοις ἐκποιεῖ λέγειν… οὐδὲ μόνον χαρᾶς καὶ εὐεργεσιῶν καὶ ἄλλων ϖολλων κατορθώσεων (sc. ἐσϑὶν αἰσθέσθαι), ἀλλὰ προνήσεως καὶ ἀνδρείας καὶὶ τῶν λοιπῶν ἀρετῶν. Virtues and vices, like the soul itself, are bodies. 102. This reconciles the apparently contradictory prospositions that the ideas of the good, the beautiful etc. are formed by observation and comparison, and that they are innate. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 13: ‘Natura boni saptientesque gignuntur, quibus a principio innascitur ratio recta constansque.’ Diogenes Laertius VII, 53: pusikw~j de\ noei=tai di/kaio/n ti kai\ a)gaqo/n. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 17: To\n peri\ a)gaqw~n kai\ kakw~n lo/gou…ma/lista tw~n e0mfu/twn a1ptestai prolh/yewn. 103. Seneca, Ad Helviam Matrem de Consolatione, 6: ‘Mens … si primam ejus originem inspexeris, non ex terreno et gravi concreta corpore, ex illo cœlesti spiritu descendit.’ 104. Diogenes Laertius VII, 114: te/ryij de/, oi[on tre/yij, protroph\ th\j yuxh~j e0pi\ to_ a)neime/non. Troph& is the term that the Stoics used to express the change through which the elements, by the diminution or augmentation of tension, transform themselves into each other. 105. 0Epige/nnhma. Diogenes Laertius VII, 85–6, 94, 95. Accessio. Seneca, De Vita beata, 9. Cf. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 9. 106. Diogenes Laertius VII, 86: e0pige/nnema ga\r fasi\n, ei0 a1ra e1stin h9donh\n ei]nai o3tan au0thn kaq’au0th\\n h( fusij e0pizhth/sasa ta\ e0narmo/zonta th=| susta&sei a0pola&bh. 107. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 121. 108. Diogenes Laertius VII, 107. Stobaeus, Eclogae, v. II, p. 158. Cicero, Ad Atticum, XVI, 14: ’Mihi non est dubium quin quod Græci kaqh=kon, nos officium.’ A being has for itself a law assigned to him by his offices: Chrysippus, according to Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I, 15: ‘Legis perpetuæ et æternæ vim, quæ quasi dux vitæ et magistra officiorum sit.’ Sometimes officia is translated by ‘duties’. But the idea of duty relates only to a perfect office, kaqh~kon te/leion, which is the reflective office of a reasonable being. Cicero, Oratio, 21: ‘Oportere enim perfectionem declarat officii.’ Cf. De Officiis, I, 27. Duty is therefore not the simple kaqh~kon, but the kato/rqwma. See below. 109. Cicero, De Officiis, I, 4; Marcus Antoninus VII, 7, 12. 110. Marcus Antoninus VII, 55. 111. Marcus Antoninus IV, 3; V, 16; VIII, 56. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 19: ‘Ex quo illud natura consequi ut communem utilitatem nostræ anteponamus.’ Diogenes Laertius VII, 123. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 48. Apollonius of Tyana, Ep., 66: Ou0 ga_r ta_ i1dia tw~n koinw~n, a0lla_ ta_ koina_ tw~n i0di/wn protimhte/on.



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112. Ap. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, V, p. 159. Diogenes Laertius VII, 100: Kalo\n to\ telei/wj su/mmetron. 113. Cicero, De Officiis, I, 28. Decorum, which is very close to the beautiful, consists primarily in æquabilitas. 114. Horace, Epistolae Ad Pisones, beginning: ‘Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam Jungere si velit …’ Verse 125: ‘Si quid inexpertum scenæ committis/ et audes/ Personam formare novam, servetur ad imum / Qualis ab incepto processerit/ et sibi constet.’ 115. Cicero, De Officiis, I, 4. Ibid. ‘Pulchritudinem, constantiam, ordinem.’ 116. Diogenes Laertius VII, 101, 127. Cf. Cicero, De Finibus, III, passim. Stobaeus, Eclogae, V. II, p. 90 sqq. 117. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 118, 120: ‘Nihil est bonum nisi quod honestum est; quod honestum est, utique bonum.’ 118. Epistulae, 76. 119. De Finibus, IV, 18. 120. Cicero, De Finibus, II, 14; III, 8; IV, 18; De Officiis, I, 4. Diogenes Laertius VII, 100. 121. Magna Moralia, I, 2: 0Esti ga\r tw~n a0gaqw~n ta\ me\n ti/mia, ta_ d’e0paineta/: … ti/mia ga\r e0f’oi]j h9 timh/. Cf. 5. Ethica Nicomachea: (O me\n ga\r e0paino\j th~j a0reth\j: praktikoi\ ga\r tw~n kalw~n a0po\ tau/thj. 122. See the essays on morals by Aristotle, the essay De Finibus bonorum et malorum of Cicero, etc. 123. Seneca, Epistulae morales. 71: ‘Summum bonum est quod honestum est; et quod magis admirere, solum bonum est quod honestum est.’ The good depends on the beautiful; the beautiful stands alone. Epistulae, 78: ‘Bonum ex honesto fluit, honestum ex se est.’ Seneca De Vita beata, 4: ‘Unum bonum, honstas; unum malum, turpitudo.’ Taurus ap. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XII, 5: ‘Neque aliud esse vere et simpliciter bonum nisi honestum, aliud quidquam malum nisi quod turpe esset.’ 124. Cicero, De Finibus, IV, 18: ‘Placet igitur tibi, Cato, cum res sumpseris non concessas, ex illis efficere quod velis.’ 125. Cicero, De Finibus, II, 11, 12; III, 5, 6; De Officiis, III, 12. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 26. 126. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 7. 127. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 17: ‘Est autem officium, quod ita factum est, ut ejus facti probabilis ratio redid possit.’ – Probable reason is opposed here to demonstrative and scientific reason, that takes place only in the katorqw&mata. 128. Cicero, Academica, I, 11. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XII, 5. 129. This formula is replaced later by another, an alteration of the former one: to live in conformity with nature. – Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, 7: To\ te/loj me\n Zh/nwn ou3twj a0pe/dwke, to\ o9mologoume/noj zh|~n, tou~to d’e0sti\ kaq’e1na lo/gou kai\ su/mfwnon zh|~n, w(j tw~n maxome/nwn zw&wn kakodaimonou/ntwn. Oi9 de\ meta\ tou~ton prosdiarqrou~ntej ou3twj e0ce/feron, o3mologoume/nwj th~ fu/sei zh~n. 130. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 89.

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131. Ambrosius, Epistulae I, X, 82: ‘Vetus dictum est; adsuesce unus esse.’ 132. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 35. 133. Diogenes Laertius VI, 88: Eu1roian bi/ou, o3tan pa/nta pra/tthtai kata\ th\n sumfwni/an tou~ par’e0ka/stw| dai/monoj pro\j th\n tou~ o3lwn dioikhtou~ bou/lhsin; Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes, III, 172: Eu)daimonia e0sti\n, w(j oi9 Stoikoi/ fasi, eu1roia bi/ou. Seneca, Epistulae, 120: ‘Hinc intellect est illa beata vita, secondo defluens cursu.’ Epictetus, Manual: Qe/le ta\ gino/mena w(s gi/netai, kai\ eu0roh/seij. 134. Chrysippus said the same: Th\n dia/noian ei]nai lo/gou phgh/n. Stobaeus, Florilegium, III, 66. 135. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 66. 136. Seneca, De Vita beata, 8. Concinere responds to the Greek sumfw/nein; in Stobaeus: kaq’e1na lo/gon kai\ su/mfwnon zh~n. 137. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 20. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 26. 138. Seneca, Epistulae, 92: ‘Quod erit in illis tunc boum?’ 139. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis; Cicero, De Finibus, III, 6. 140. Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, II, p. 179: Klea/nqej (te/loj h9gei=tai) to\ o9mologoume/noj th|~ fu/sei zh|~n e0n tw|~ eu)logistei=n, o3 e0n th|~ kata\ fu/sin e0klogh|~ lei~sqai diela&mbanen, k.t.l. Diogenes Laertius VII, 88: (O de\ Dioge/ nhj t/eloj fhsi\ r9htw~j, to\ eu0logistei=n e0n th|= tw~n kata_ fu/sin e0xlogh|~. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 4: ‘Quum enim virtutis hoc proprium sit, earum rerum quæ secundum naturam sint habere delectum, qui omnia sic exæquaverunt ut in utramque partem ita paria redderent uti nulla selectione uterentur, virtutem ipsam sustulerunt.’ Seneca, Epistulae morales, 92: ‘Non quia bona sunt, sed quia secundum naturam sunt, et quia bono a me judicio summuntur.’ 141. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 6, 16; Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes, III, 24; Seneca, Epistulae morales, 74. 142. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 19; Marcus Antoninus VI, 7; VII, 12, 55 ; IX, 74. 143. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 66: ‘Bonum sine ratione nullum est; sequitur autem ratio naturam. Quid est ergo ratio? Naturæ imitatio. Quid est summum hominis bonum? Ex naturæ voluntate se gerere.’ 144. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 6: ‘Ea (selecio) perpetua, tum ad extremum constans consentaneaque naturaæ.’ 145. Cicero, Academica, II, 8: ‘Sapientiam, artem vivendi, quæ ipsa ex sese habeat constantiam.’ Seneca, Epistulae morales. 29: ‘Sapientia ars est.’ Epistulae morales, 90: ‘Non dat natura virtutem; ars est bonum fieri.’ Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 120; Diogenes Laertius VII, 86; Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes III, 25. 146. Diogenes Laertius VII, 87. 147. Diogenes Laertius VII, 90. 148. Seneca, Epistulae morales. 124: ‘Cætera in sua natura perfecta sunt, non vere perfecta a quibus abest ratio … Non potest ergo perfectæ naturæ bonum in imperfect esse natura.’ Diogenes Laertius VII, 85, 94. 149. Diogenes Laertius VII, 89. 150. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 104.



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151. Epistulae morales, 74. 152. Epistulae morales, 31. 153. Cicero, Academica, II, 8. 154. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 7. 155. Ibid. 156. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 110: 3Wsper h9 i0sxuj tou~ sw&matoj to/noj e0sti\n i9kano\j e0n neu/roij, ou1tw kai\ h9 th~j yuxh~j i0sxu\j to/noj e0stin i9kano\j e0n tw|~ kri/nein kai\ pra/ttein. 157. Crysippus, in Stobaeus, Sermones, CIII, 22: (Otan ai9 me/sai pra/ceij (the kaqh/ konta or offices) au[tai prosla/bwsi to\ be/baio\n kai\ e9ktiko\n, kai\ i0di/an ph~ci/n tina labw~si. 158. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 66. 159. Marcus Antoninus, X, 11. 160. Marcus Antoninus, ΙV, 51, 18: Kata\ ta\ th\n grammh\n tre/xein o)rqo/n. 161. De Officiis. I, 8. Marcus Antoninus, V, 14: Katorqw/seij ai0 toiau~tai pra&ceij o) noma&zontai, th\n o)rqo&that th~j o(dou~ shmai/nousai. 162. De Finibus, III, 2. Cf. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 124. 163. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 71. 164. Cicero, Academica, I, 10: ‘Perturbationes voluntarias esse putabat (sc. Zeno), opinionisque judicio suscipi.’ Tusculanae Disputationes IV: ‘Omnes eas esse in nostra potestate omnes judicio susceptas, omnes voluntarias.’ De Finibus, III, 10: ‘Nulla naturæ vi commoventur, omniaque ea sunt opiniones ac judicia levitatis.’ Plutarch, Utra animalia, etc: Ta\ pa&qh su/mpanta koinw~j kri/seij fau/laj kai\ do/caj o9mologou~sin ei]nai. Id. De Gener. Anim: Tw~n filoso/fwn oi9 me\n ta\ pa/qh lo/gouj poiou~sin, w(j pa~san e0piqumi/an kai\ lu/phn kai\ o0rgh\n kri/seij ou]saj. – The Stoics apparently thought that judgement on good and evil becomes affection or passion by a metamorphosis, whose rapidity makes it unconscious to us. Plutarch, De Gener. An.: 1Enioi de/ fasin ou0x e3teron ei]nai lo/gou to\ pa/qoj, ou0de\ duoi=n diafora\n kai\ sta/sin, a0ll’e9no\j lo/gou tro/phn e0p’a0mfo/tera, lanqa/nousan h(ma~j o0cuthti kai\ ta/xei metabolh~j k.t.l. 165. Diogenes Laertius VII, 110 – Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes IV, 21 ‘Appetitus vehementior.’ According to Galen, it was Chrysippus that would entirely reduce the passions to judgements. Zeno supposedly saw movements consecutive (e0pige/ nnhmata) to judgements, in them. De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis: Xru/sippoj me\n ou]n e0n tw|~ prw&tw| peri/ paqw~n a0podeiknu~nai peira~tai kri/seij tina\j tou~ logistikou~ ei]nai. Zh/nwn de\ ou) ta_j kri/seij au0taj, a)lla\ ta\j e)piginome/naj au0tai=j sustola\j kai\ lu/seij, e0pa/rseij te kai\ ta\j ptw&seij th~j yuxh~j e0no/mizen ei]nai ta\ pa/qh. 166. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 74: ‘Virtus enim conventia constat.’ 167. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 66: ‘Omnis in modo est virtus; modus certa mensura est.’ 76: ‘Solum ergo bonum est honestum, cui modus est.’ 168. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 116: ‘Utrum satius sit modicos habere affectus an nullos, sæpe quæsitum est. Nostri expellunt, Peripatetici temperant’ (Cf. Epistulae, 85). Cicero, Academica, I, 11: ‘Cum antique perturbationem animi ex homine

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non tollerent, naturaque et condolescere et concupiscere et extimescere et efferri lætitia dicerent, sed ea contraherent in angustumque deducerent, Zeno omnibus his quasi morbis voluit carere sapientem.’ 169. Galen, De Hippocratia et Platonis Decretis, IV, ap. Salmasius ad Epictetus π. 94: Ai0ta~tai (sc. Xru/sippoj) tw~n prattome/nwn ou0x o)rqw~j a)toni/an te kai\ a0sqe/neian th~j yuxh~j. – 0Endo/ntoj tou~ to/nou th~j yuxh~j…– Kai\ w(j kata_ tou\j oi9 e0pi\ tou~ sw&matoj le/gontai to/nouj, a!tonoi te kai\ e1ntonoi e0smen kata_ to\ neurw~dej, kai\ o( e0n th|~ yuxh|~ le/getai to/noj, w(j eu0toni/a kai\ a0toni/a. 170. Marcus Antoninus, V, 14: Κατορθώσεις αἱ τοιαύται ϖράξεις ὀνομάξονται, τὴν ὀρθότητα τῆς ὁδοῦ σημαίνουσαι. (Cf. IV, 18, 51; VIII, 61; XII, 1). 171. Diogenes Laertius VII, 158: Ai0ti/aj de/ paqw~n a0polei/pousi ta_j peri\ to\ pneu~ma tropa/j. Plutarch, De Gen. Animæ in Justus Lipsius, Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam, p. 155: 9Eno\j lo/gou troph\n e0p’a)mfo/tera, lanqa/nousan h(ma~j o0cu/thti kai\ taxei= metabolh=j. 172. The Stoics named these three affections eu0paqei/ai (Diogenes Laertius VII, 115), a word that Cicero translated by constantiæ. 173. Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes IV, 6: ‘Cum ratione animus movetur, placide atque constanter, gaudium dici; cum autem inaniter et effuse exultat, lælitiam; quam ita definiunt: sine ratione animi elationem.’ 174. Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes IV, 6: ‘Vehementiorem (sc. appetitum) eum volunt essen qui longius discesserit a naturæ constantia.’ De Officiis I, 29: ‘Nam qui appetitus longius evagantur, et tanquam exultantessive cupiendo sive fugiendo, non satis a ratione retinentur, hi sine dubio finem et modum transeunt.’ 175. Diogenes Laertius VII, 125; Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 7; Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, II, 14. 176. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 66. 177. Seneca, Epistulae, 65. Cicero, Paradoxa stoicorum, 3: ‘Etenim si bene facta recte facta sunt et nihil recto rectius, certe ne bono quidem melius quidquam inveniri potest.’ 178. Diogenes Laertius VII, 124; Seneca, De Beneficiis, IV, 26–7; V, 15. 179. Diogenes Laertius VII, 121. 180. Ibid., 117. 181. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 120. 182. [Horace, Satires, III: ‘so the wise man’s alone the master of every role.’] 183. Diogenes Laertius VII, 125. 184. Academica, II, xv. 185. Seneca, Epistulae morales. 50, 83; De Constantia sapientis, 3. S. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei IX, 4: ‘Accidunt (sc. perturbationes) animo sapientis, salva serenitate sapientiaæ.’ That Chryssipus agreed, as Diogenes Laertius claims, that drunkenness or melancholy can make one lose wisdom, is hardly believable. 186. Cicero, Academica I, 11; Seneca, Epistulae morales, 85, 116. 187. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, IX, 102: Kai\ pa~sai ai9 e0pi ta\ me/rh tou~ o3lou e0capostello/menai duna/meij w(j a)po/ tinoj pegh~j tou~ h(gemonikou~



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a)postello/ntai, w3ste pa/san th\n du/naming th\n peri\ to\ me/roj ou]san kai\ peri\ to\ o3lon ei]nai, dia\ to\ a0po\ tou~ e0n au0tw|~ h(gemonikou~ diadi/dosqai. On the dia/dosij, see Plotinus, Ennead, IV, ix, 2; Salmasius, ad Epictetus, 282; Claudius Ptolemaeus, De judicandi facultate et animi principatu, passim. 188. Crysippus according to Chalcidius, in Timaeus, p. 308. 189. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, IV, 4, 21. 190. Iamblichus according to Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 52: Pneu/mata ga\r a)po\ tou~ h(gemonikou~ pasin o1nta diatei/nein a!lla ei0j a!lla. 191. Seneca, De Providentia, 5. Epistulae morales, 77: ‘Series invicta et nulla mutabilis ope illigat et trahit cuncta.’ Cf. Quæstiones Naturales, II, 36. Laertius VII, 149: Ai0ti/a tw~n o1ntwn ei0rome/nh. Seneca, De Beneficiis, V, 7: ‘Series causarum implexa.’ Tacitus, Annales, VI, 22. 192. Chrysippus in Aulus Gellius, VI, 2: Ei0marme/nhn ei]nai fusikh\n su/ntacin tw~n o3lwn, e0c a0idi/ou, tw~n e9terwn toi=j e9te/roij e0pakolouqou~twn, ametabo\lou kai\ a0paraba/tou ou1shj th~j toiau/thj sumplokh=j. 193. S. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei, V, 8: ‘Omnium connexionem seriemque caussarum, qua fit omne quod fit, fati nomine appelant.’ Aulus Gellius, VI, 2: ‘Quanquam ita sit, inquit Chrysippus, ut ratione quadam principali necfesario juncta atque connexa fato sint omnia.’ 194. Philemon: Dou~loi basilew~n ei0si\n oi9 basilei=j qew~n, 9O qeo\j a)na&gkhj. 195. Seneca, De Providentia, 5: ‘Eadem necessitas et deos alligat; irrevocabilis divina partier atque humana cursus vehit.’ 196. Laertius VII, 149: Ei0marme/ne … lo/goj kaq’o1n o9 ko/smoj dieca/getai. Manil. Astron. I: ‘Sed nihil in tota magis est mirabile mole; quam ratio, et certis quod legibus omnia parent.’ 197. Cleanthes in Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 32; Plutarch, Adversus Stoicos, 13, 14; De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 21, 35, 36, 44; Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, VI, 1. See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum I, 13–15. 198. Cicero, Academica, I, 8: ‘E quibus (sc. qualibus) in omni natura cohærente et continua eum omnibus suis partibus effectum esse mundum.’ 199. Alexander Aphrodisias, De Mexitione, p. 142: 9Hnw~sqai me\n…th\n su/mpasan ou)si/an, pneu/matoj tino/j dia_ pa/shj, au0th~j dih/kontoj, u(f’ou0 suna&getai/ te kai\ summe/nei kai\ sumpaqe/j e0stin au0tw|~. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, IX, 78. 200. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 22. 201. Diogenes Laertius VII, 139; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 11. 202. Diogenes Laertius VII, 136; Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I, 7: 0Emperieilhfo\j pa/ntaj tou\j spermatikou\j lo/gouj. Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 372. 203. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 22. 204. See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum, II, 10. 205. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 22: ‘Ipsius, vero mundi qui omnia complexu suo cœrcet et continet, natura non artificiosa solum sed plane artifex ab eodem Zenone dicitur.’ 206. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, 6, f. 3 b: Th\n a)rxh\n th~j kinh/sewj ou0

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terou~sin a0kinhton, w(j 0Aristote/lei doxei=. Stobaeus, Eclogae, phys. T. I, p. 339: Oi9 Stwikoi\ to prw~ton ai1tion w(ri/santo kinhto/n. 207. Seneca, De Consolatione ad Helvium, 8. 208. Tertullian, De Anima, 44: ‘Stoici enim volunt Deum sic per materiam decucurrisse, quomodo mel per favos.’ 209. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, præf. 210. Seneca, De Beneficiis, IV, 7: ‘Quid enim aliud est natura quam Deust et divina ratio toti mundo et partibus ejus inserta.’ Id. Quæst. Nat. II, 45: ‘Vis Deum naturam vocare? Non peccabis. Est enim ex quo nata sunt omnia.’ Diogenes Laertius VII, 148. 211. Chrysippus ap. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 41: Di/ a0e/roj ei0j u3dwr tre/petai. Diogenes Laertius VII, 136, 142; Cornutus, c. XVII; Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 372, 446. Lucretius, I, I: ‘Et primum faciunt ignem se vertere in auras Aeris, hinc imbrem gigni, terramque creari, Ex imbri, retroque a terra cuncta reverti, Humorem primum, post aera, deinde calorem; Nec cessare hæc inter se mutare, meare De coelo ad terram, de terra ad sidera mundi.’ 212. Only a part of divinity becomes the soul of the world and dwells in it. Diogenes Laertius VII, 147: Ei]nai de\ to\n me\n (sc. qe\on), dhmiourgo\n tw~n o4lwn kai\ w3sper pate\ra pa/ntwn koinw~j te kai\ to\ me/roj au)tou~ to\ dih~kon dia\ pa/ ntwn. 213. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, III, 13: ‘Hunc (sc. ignem) considere, et nihil elinqui aliud in rerum natura, igne restricto, quam humorem: in hoc furuti mundi spem latere.’ 214. Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, V, p. 599 C. 215. Chrysippus in Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis, 38, 41; Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 446. 216. Cicero, De Natura Deorum II, 46; Pliny Historia Naturalis, II, 9, 68. It was a common opinion in antiquity that the stars are nourished from the vapours of the sublunary world. (See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum II, 14; Jac. Thomas, De Exustione mundi stoica, V, 11; Bayle, Pensées diverses, II, 128.) Aristotle did not share this view, and believed in an immovable heaven. 217. Seneca, Quæstiones Naturales, III, 113. 218. Diogenes Laertius VII, 134. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 46. See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum II, 22–3, and above all J. Thomas, De Exustione mundi stoica, II, p. 160. 219. Basil, Homilia 3 in Haxaemeron; Nemesius, De Natura Hominis, 38; Eusebius, Præparatio Evangelica XV, 16. See Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, IV, 5, and Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, XI, 1. 220. Marcus Antoninus IX, 28: Tau~ta_ e0sti ta_ tou~ ko/smou e0gku/klia, a!nw ka&tw e0c ai0w~noj ei0j ai0w~na. Plato said: 0Aei\ ga_r a3panta a!nw te kai\ ka/tw r9ei=. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 24: ‘Omnia transeunt ut reverantur.’ Tacitus, Annales, III, 55: ‘Rebus cunctis inest quidam velut orbis.’ 221. See the dissertation of J. Thomasius, entitled Phœnix. 222. Posidonius in Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, p. 58: Qeo/j e0sti pneu~ma noero\n kai\



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purw~dej, ou0k e1xon morfh\n, metaba&llon de\ ei0j a2 bou/letai, kai\ ecomoiou/menon pa~si. 223. Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, I, 7; Diogenes Laertius VII, 147; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II, 24 sqq.; Seneca, De Beneficiis IV, 8; Cornutus, De Natura Deorum, passim. 224. See Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum, I, 19. 225. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 39; Adversus Stoicos, 13, 36; Cleanthes in Stobaeus, Eclogae I, 374: 0Ec e9no&j te pa&nta gi/gnesqai kai\ e0k pa&ntwn ei0j e3n sugkri/nesqai. 226. Cicero, De Natura Deorum. II, 61: ‘E quibus vita beata existit par et similis Deorum ; nulla alia re nisi immortalitate, quæ nihil ad bene vivendum pertinet cedens caelestibus.’ Seneca, Epistulae morales, 73. 227. Seneca, De Constantia sapientis, 8: ‘Sapiens autem vicinus proximusque Diis consentit, excepta mortalitate similis Deo.’ 228. Seneca (ap. Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, 65): ‘Dedit (natura) tibi illa, quæ si non deserueris, par Deo surges.’ 229. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 76: ‘Quid in homine proprium? Ratio.’ 230. Cicero, De Finibus, IV, 4: ‘Quumque duæ sint artes quibus perfecte ratio et oratio compleatur, una inveniendi, altera disserendi, hanc posteriorem et Stoici et Peripateci, priorem autem illi egregie tradiderunt, hi omnino ne attigerunt qiudem.’ Topica, beginning: ‘Quum omnis ratio diligens dissergandi duas habeat partes, unam inveniendi, alteram judicandi, utriusque princeps, ut mihi quidem videtur, Aristoteles fuit, Stoici autem in altera elaboraverunt, etc. Judicandi enim vias diligenter persecuti sunt, ea scientia quam dialecticen appellant; inveniendi vero artem, quæ topica dicitur, quæque ad usum potior erat, et ordine naturae certe prior, totam reliquerunt.’ 231. Cicero, De Finibus, V, 28. 232. Cicero, De Finibus, III, 22: ‘Admirabilis compositio disciplinææ, incredibilisque rerum … ordo … Quid enim aut in natura, qua nihil est aptius, nihil descriptius, aut in operibus manu factis tam compositum tamque compactum et coagmentatum inveniri potest? Quid posterius priori non convenit? Quid sequitur quod non respondeat superiori? Quid non sic aliud ex alio necetitur ut non, si unam litteram moveris, labent omnia?’ 233. Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, II, 18: Tou~ Qeou~ me/mnhso: e0kei=non e0pikalou bohqo\n kai\ parasta/thn. 234. Dissertationes, I, 19. 235. Epistulae morales, 41: ‘Bonum vir sine Deo nemo est.’ 236. Epistulae morales, 73: ‘Nulla sine De omens bona est.’ 237. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 31. The same Euripides (in Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata): ): 9O nou~j ga\r h9mi=n e0stin e0n e0ka&stw| qeo/j, and Meander (in Plutarch, Platonicae Quæstiones, 1): 9O nou~j ga\r h9mw~n qeo/j. See Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, XII, 26. 238. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 41: ‘Quemadmodum radii solis contingent quidem terram, sed ibi sunt unde mittuntur, sic animus magnus et sacer, et in hoc

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demissus et propius divina nossemus, conversatur quidem nobiscum, sed hæret origini suæ: nostris tanquam melior interest.’ 239. Epistulae morales, 31. 240. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 27: 9O Qeo\j a)reth\n me\n ou) di/dwsin a)nqrw&poij, a)lla_ to\ kalo_n au)qai/reto/n e0sti, plou~ton de\ kai\ u9gi/eian xwri\j a)reth~j di/dwsin. 241. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, III: ‘Propter virtutem enim laudamur et in virtute gloriamur; quod non fieret si donum esset Dei, non a nobis. – Judicium hoc omnium mortalium est fortunam a Deo petendam, a se ipso sumendam esse sapientiam.’ 242. Epistulae morales, 41: ‘Quam stultum est optare, cum possis impetrare! Non sunt ad coelom elevandæ manus.’ 243. Seneca, Epistulae, 31: ‘Turpe etiamnum deos fatigare. Quid votis opus est? Fac te ipse felicem.’ 244. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, III, ‘Atque hoc quidem omnes mortales sic habent: omnem commoditatem prosperitatemque vitæ a diis se habere; virtutem autem nemo unquam acceptam Deo retulit.’ 245. [‘But ’tis enough to pray Jove, who gives and takes away, that he grant me life, and grant me means: a mind well balanced I will myself provide.’] Horace, Epistularum, I, 18. 246. Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 19; De Profect. In virt. 1. Cf. Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, p. 235. 247. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 5: ‘Frons nostra populo conveniat: intus omnia dissimilia sint.’ 248. See Gataker, ad Marcus Antoninus, V, 51: XI, 18. 249. Seneca, De Constantia sapientis 3. [‘So, for all your lofty assumption, you reach the same level as the other schools – only the names of things are changed.’] 250. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 70. 251. Saint Augustine, Civitate Dei XIX, 4: ‘Quæ mala Stoici philosophi miror qua fronte mala non esse contendant, quibus fatentur, si anta fuerint ut ea sapiens vel non possit vel non debeat sustinere, cogi eum mortem sibimet inferre, atque ex hac vita emigrare…O vitam beatam quæ, ut finiatur, mortis quærit auxilium!’ 252. Stobaeus, Eclogae, according to Justus Lipsius, Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam, III, 22. 253. Plutarch, Adversus Stoicorum, 11. 254. This is the reasoning that the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias opposes to the Stoics. 255. See principally Cicero’s Academics and the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus. 256. Cicero, De Finibus, IV, 17: ‘Minime vero illud probo quod, dum docuistis, ut vobis videmi, solum bonum esse quod honestum sit, tum rursum dicitis initia proponi necesse esse apta et accommodate naturæ, quorum ex selection virtus posit existere? … Quid autem minus consentaneum est quam quod aiunt, cognito



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summo bono, reverti se ad naturam ut ab ea petant agendi principium, id est officia?’ 257. Seneca, Epistulae morales, 65; cf. 54, 71, 88. 258. Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, I, 12. 259. IV, 3: VII, 55; VIII, 12, 23, 26; IV, 31; XI, 20. 260. II, 17; IV, 43; V, 23; VI, 15; VIII, 19. 261. V, 33; VI, 15, 2; XII, 3; III, 16. 262. II, I, 2; III, 3, 16; XII, 3, 26; XIII, 14.

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4 The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci Bodies, independently of their other properties, are all situated in space and have all a particular figure; these are their essential and fundamental attributes. They are what geometry considers; they are also the object of Drawing [Dessin]. Geometry explains them, drawing represents them. Situations and figures result from relations of magnitudes, from in other words, relations of proportions. Drawing considered in a general way, and in the different arts that one calls representative arts [les arts du dessin], can therefore be defined as the representation of proportions, just as geometry can be defined as their science. In representing the proportions of things – abstracting from, as much as possible, all their other qualities – art teaches us to know them better, but in a way and for a purpose that belong to them. We know only the things that we understand, and, that is to say, only things known in their relation to, in their connection with, their principles. Art must therefore, like geometry, make us familiar with proportions in making principles manifest. But by the ‘principle’ of a thing is meant either the elements of which it is composed, or, on the contrary, the form that it must have, which is the goal in view of which its elements are unified or – which amounts to the same thing – the thought that has made it what it is. The first perspective is that of geometry; the second is characteristic of art. Geometry thus has us understand proportions by analysing them, by breaking them down; art has us understand them by drawing out, by making more manifest the nature of the form constituting their unity. ‘Mathematicians’, says Leonardo da Vinci, who was both artist and geometer, ‘consider proportions’, but ‘do not trouble themselves with their quality’.1 Art, in contrast, troubles itself with the particular quality called the character of things, the quality by which each has its own meaning, and which, consequently, is an expression of the spirit from which each thing derives. In representing the proportions of things, it is spirit that art has the task of expressing.

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First of all, in animate beings, the relative situation of the members and of the mobile parts of the features are variable by means of the affections or volitions determining their movement: these situations, therefore, express volitions, affections, determinations, internal movements of the immaterial principle that moves and animates matter. This gives rise to the manifest possibility of representing spirit itself through drawing. ‘Art has two tasks’, says Leonardo da Vinci: ‘it must represent the body of man; and by the gestures and movements of its parts, it must represent his spirit.’2 The same idea is expressed in the same terms in Socrates’ conversation with Parrhasius related to us by Xenophon.3 Representing movements is not just one aspect of art among others; it is – following Leonardo da Vinci,4 Michelangelo,5 Poussin,6 as well as the Ancients7 – the highest and most difficult part. And, indeed, the great masters are distinguished by their invention of movements; it is, above all, characteristic attitudes or gestures that reveal, even in the most incomplete sketch or in remnants the most mistreated by time, the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, of Fra Bartolommeo, of Perugino, of Raphael, of Michelangelo, or the still more sublime genius of Phidias. The highest part of drawing is thus ‘representing thought by movements and gestures that accord with it’.8 Though it is by movements that spirit is manifest with the greatest clarity and evidence, figure also makes it known and bears its imprint. A common failing of painters is that they make the figures they invent resemble themselves, and this, claims Leonardo da Vinci, is proof that our body is such as our spirit was happy to form it. ‘This defect’, he says ‘must be strongly resisted, because it is born with judgement. For the spirit that reigns in your body is one with your own judgement, and it is pleased greatly with works similar to the one it has itself made in composing for itself its body.’9 Whatever we are to make of this opinion – and regardless of whether we hold that it is the spirit through which we think or spirit in a quite different sense that gave birth to our body – it is certain that the figure of each body is, in all its parts, the manifestation of one and the same thought, in its particular character, unitary and indivisible, as is all thought, as is spirit itself. This gives rise, in everything that nature has formed, to the accord of all the proportions, which makes of it a harmony, and that art must observe above all. ‘Each part of a whole’, writes Leonardo, ‘should be proportionate to that whole; if a man is short and fat, make sure that he is so constituted in each of his members; that he has short and fat arms; large and fat hands; short fingers, and so on with everything else. And I say this in a general way for all animals and plants.’10 For the things of which nature does not offer a model to art – for buildings, for example – the same rule exists, the same law of proportion: ‘Just as’, as Leon-Baptiste Alberti has it, ‘in an animate being the members should correspond to the members, so too in an edifice the parts should respond to the parts. Hence the precept that in a



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great edifice the members should also be great; a precept that the ancients observed scrupulously, so much so that in public buildings of vast dimensions they took care to ensure that the bricks themselves were bigger than in their private buildings.’11 ‘The parts should be arranged in such a way’, as Palladio often says, ‘that they correspond to the whole and to each other.’12 According to all the great masters, a building, whatever it is exactly, should, like an animate being, be a whole whose parts cooperate, with the whole ensemble, in the pursuit of the same goal, and contribute to the expression of one and the same thought. The same can be said, for the same reason, of a piece of music, a drama or a poem, and what Horace’s verses express amounts to a universal law: Sit quodvis simplex duntaxat et unum. Primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum.13

The following words of Cicero – which he applies to the system of the philosophers14 who were probably the first to formulate the rule precisely, and who were able to adjoin an example to the precept – say the same thing: Respondent extrema primis, media utrisque, omnia omnibus.15

Thus, whatever else art does, to the extent that its purpose is to represent proportions, and to make them understood in their essence and in their truth, it is not the material of these proportions which is, strictly speaking, its object, but their spirit, and this is why the accord of the proportions – or harmony, expression of the unity of spirit – is the first law of art.16 The purpose of art is not only to express the spirit of a thing, its individual and distinctive character. Art has a still more elevated task, a higher goal. How is it that the situations, the forms – in a word, the proportions – interest and please us by themselves, and why is it that art endeavours to represent them? The truth is that it is through this harmony – a reflection and sign of the unity of spirit – that they are beautiful. Beauty is, in the final analysis, the quality of proportions that art has the task of expressing. And this is the ultimate reason for the difference that we announced by comparing geometry and drawing at the beginning. ‘Mathematics only extends to knowledge of quantities, and is hardly concerned with quality, which is the beauty of the works of nature and the ornament of the world.’17 Although mathematics considers order, proportion and size, which are the elements of beauty,18 it does not consider beauty itself, and, in contrast, beauty is the real reason for which art is concerned with the nature of size, order and proportion. Thus Poussin says, in agreement with Leonardo: ‘Painting is more concerned with the idea of the beautiful than with any other. Hence some have wanted this idea to be the soul object and goal of all good painters; and painting which adores and pursues beauty is the queen of art.’19

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Since, in all the works of nature, the proportions correspond to each other, and thus always form some harmony, no work of nature can be without some beauty. Even monsters, thanks to the spirit that produced and animates them, to an extent still correspond (as philosophical anatomy has showed) to themselves in their deformity, and, for all that they may lack grace, to some degree participate in the universal harmony. But just as, among souls, there are some whose perfection seems clearly to reveal the superior spirit from which they originate, so too, in all these forms, there are some whose proportions, according to Leonardo’s expression, appear divine. These proportions are those that compose, better than and before all others, as Palladio also says, a harmonious concert.20 It is to these, in the end, that beauty belongs. Just as all spirit derives from divine spirit, so too all the different proportions that nature lays out for us refer back to these divine proportions. All imperfect harmonies proceed from the perfect harmony of divine proportions, and in beauty the very soul, so to speak, of so many diverse spirits is to be found. This ultimately entails that in order to represent the proportions of things in their truth and their essence, it is beauty that art must represent. In not restricting itself to reproducing the letter of the forms and proportions, and in expressing the sense, the character, the spirit proper to things, art raises itself from imitation to interpretation. In expressing by beauty the very ground of things, it raises itself higher still; it no longer expresses only what things are, but what they ought to be; it represents, it exposes what philosophy explains: the cause, the principle. ‘Poetry’, as a great philosopher has it, ‘is a more serious and more philosophical thing than history; for poetry addresses the general, history the particular. The general is what a character of such and such a type will have to do, probably or necessarily; and this is what poetry represents with proper names; the particular is what a certain person has done or what has happened to him.’21 Art is thus not always, unlike history, a simple reproduction of what reality presents to us. It excises; it condenses. It excises the accidents troubling the expression of thought, the intention of nature; it condenses what the accidents have separated and what the spirit of nature gathers together. Just as the scholar, in the presence of monuments from the past, attempts to restore them such as their architect had conceived them, in the same way, in modifying what reality presents to us, art does nothing other than clear away obstacles that prevent the spirit of nature, and, better, the divine spirit from which it proceeds, coming to light. It is thus always nature that imitates art;22 nature such as it comes to presence in some degree in all its works, and such as everywhere and always it wants to be. Now, if art, understood in the highest sense, in imitating nature such as it must be and wants to be – and that is to say in representing nature’s ideal – hardly represents this or that individual, with the accidental circumstances that are particular to it, but much rather the general, does it follow that the ideal can be wholly reduced, as has



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been said, to the general; that consequently art has nothing to do with individuality, and thus that individuality should be absent from its works? The ideal, in each thing, is general, because it is the archetype of which different individuals of the same genre offer more or less similar images, and which, consequently, includes all the perfections that are common to them; but that does not prevent it being of a perfect individuality. – The ideal, in each thing, is the model of perfection; any model of perfection cannot contain incompletion or indeterminacy. But all generality is necessarily something indeterminate and incomplete. In the works of nature, in particular, spirit is essential, the principle and purpose of everything else. Yet spirit is life and, thus, individuality itself. How, then, can a form or general rule, exclusive of individuality, stand for anything at all in nature as a veritable ideal? General rules express only the conditions of perfection. The ideal, quite different from these rules, is perfection itself, inseparable from individuality; the perfection that nature offers to us here and there in the individuals that it has formed, and whose primary source is the superior individuality from which their own derives, namely that of Spirit, the universal and supreme ideal. Hence the principal task that the true artist sets himself, in realizing the ideal, is to offer, not the cold personification of abstract rules, but – just as nature does, the nature he imitates – real and living individualities; thus it is by assiduous contemplation of the individual forms created by nature that, in being suffused by the spirit of life animating them, he makes himself capable, in turn, of animating with the same spirit his own creations.23 Respicere exemplar vitae morumque jubebo Doctum imitatorem, et vivas hinc ducere voces,

as Horace says:24 and it is in this way, indeed, that art was understood and practised by the great masters – the likes of Homer, Shakespeare, Phidias, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael – who knew, in order to examine the diverse aspects of the universal ideal, how to form, with the elements that nature presented to them, characters marked by such a strong individuality. Also, far from works of art having to be, as has been said,25 wholly different in character to that of nature, according to all the masters, on the contrary, the final effort of art must be to make art disappear so that its works seem to be the works of nature herself.26 Now, of our five senses, there are two by which we gain direct knowledge of the situations and forms of bodies, and, consequently, of their proportions: touch and sight. But, besides the fact that the first of these two senses provides the feeling of forms or situations only together with the diverse properties of matter, it grants us access to extended objects only in a successive fashion; with touch alone, therefore, it would be difficult to recognize the proportions of things as a whole, and, consequently, their harmonies.

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For sight, on the contrary, the figure of things frees itself in a certain way from their matter, is given all at once, and forms a whole whose parts we grasp at one and the same moment. ‘When proportions are described to us,’ as Leonardo says in comparing representation in painting to the descriptions offered by poets, ‘time separates them from each other and places forgetting between them; and this is why the poet is unable to form a harmony from these proportions.’27 ‘There is harmony’, as he continues, ‘only when proportionality makes itself seen or heard. But, in the description that a poet offers of something beautiful, one part succeeds the other, and no sooner does the following one emerge than the proceeding one disappears. It cannot therefore make manifest the proportionality of the parts that compose the divine beauties of this face before me, which, brought together all at the same time, causes in me by their divine proportions a pleasure that nothing on earth made by man can equal.’28 The same thing can be said of the perception of forms by touch, compared to those provided by sight. Thus he who has never seen light, says Leonardo, does not know what sort of thing beauty is. At least, he knows it only by sound, and there is no other art than music for him.29 ‘For’, he adds, ‘the beauty of the world consists in the surfaces of bodies, as much accidental as natural, which are reflected in the eye of man.’30 This entails that it is for the eye that all the figurative arts work.31 This also entails that if the arts of drawing in general consist in representing, such as they are or ought to be, the proportions of things, to know how to draw is to know how to judge them visually. To execute a drawing is only to translate and apply to some matter the judgement that the eye has made concerning the proportions. Consequently, as the same master who nobody has surpassed in the perfection of his execution says, ‘the principle of art consists in the good judgement of the eye’. ‘The hands execute’, as Michelangelo said, ‘and the eye judges.’32 It is for that reason, says Leonardo, that art is not, as many consider it to be, something mechanical, but something intellectual, cosa mentale.33 Teaching drawing will be, therefore, nothing other than teaching the eye to judge well. There is nothing more natural and more common, as it would seem at first glance, than the eye’s sound judgement. Do we not need, at each moment, for all the practical purposes of life, to compare dimensions and to assess their relations?34 Does not all the action, do not all the movements of the body imply an accurate estimation of distances and forms? And yet, if everyone judged visible magnitudes, everyone would be capable, if not of representing them with ease and grace, at least of indicating what is essential to them, of marking their positions and relative distances precisely. Far from everyone having such a capacity, there is none that is less common, and there is none whose acquisition and development requires more study.



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Indeed, nothing is more different than the judgement of magnitudes necessary for the ordinary purposes of life and the judgement required by art. In the ordinary course of life, it is often necessary to measure dimensions, and, less frequently, to measure proportions. Even less frequently is it necessary to appreciate proportions with the exactitude required by the practice of drawing. And, in the end, just when we need, for such and such a mechanical operation, to judge the proportions of things, we only compare them one by one and successively; we do not have to bother ourselves with how the different proportions correspond to each other, with, in a word, the ensemble they compose, still less with the spiritual character which they express and derive from. – If, in the end, we often have to judge beauty, and even if everyone is ‘capable of distinguishing a beautiful from an ugly person, and even of recognising that a mouth is too large, a shoulder too high or too low’,35 it is nevertheless without perceiving distinctly in beauty and in ugliness what explains them both: on the one hand, the accord, the perfect concert of proportions, and, on the other, dissonance. In contrast, the good judgement of the eye, in which for Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo the principal of art consists, is judgement that measures proportions with precision; it is what, above all, appreciates their harmonies and understands their spirit. Now for something remarkable! It just so happens that the proportions, such as they appear to the eye that is their sole judge, are very different to what they are in reality. In reality, things have three dimensions, length, breadth and depth; for sight they are reduced, and almost always more or less condensed, to images projected onto a surface. Indeed, things are visible by the rays of light that come in a straight line from their surfaces to our eyes, and which, after crossing over through the crystalline lens, strike the retina. These rays form thus two opposed cones with their summits meeting in one and the same place, the lens, and whose bases are, in the one case, the reality from which they emanate, and, in the other case, the surface of the retina where they terminate. Several consequences follow from this: first, from the point where our eye is situated, we can see only the surfaces from which straight lines depart so as to terminate at this point; in this way, our eye, as has been said of our spirit,36 can have only one point of view on things at each moment. Secondly, the more these surfaces are positioned obliquely in relation to the surface of our retina, the more, being visible to us only by the projections that they form on it, they appear reduced; in this way, the perception that we have of things by sight is one that, for the most part, alters them, and changes their figure. In the end, the more the things are distant from the eye, and the more, consequently, the visual cone whose base they form, in stretching itself out, becomes sharper towards its summit, the more also the base of the opposed cone, which rests on the retina, shrinks. In this way, the vast spectacle

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of nature – the earth, sea, sky, the immense spaces which separate the stars – can appear in a reduced and abbreviated form on this narrow surface; and thus, from its particular point of view, our eye, just like our spirit, concentrates, so to speak, the universe within itself. Let us add that, although the crossing of the luminous rays in their passage through the lens entails that the objects are depicted inverted in our eye, we see them the right way up. Consequently, we see the basis of the internal visual cone resting on the retina in the inverse disposition to what a cross-section of the external cone, at the same distance from the lens, would present. If we imagine, therefore, a screen that cuts the visual external cone at a distance from the lens equal to that separating the lens from the retina, it is on the surface of this screen, which one can call the visual screen, that the visible world would appear to us, by a form of shortcut, in its perspectival projection. Thus, in truth, we do not really see objects, and not even the real forms of objects, but rather the signs that, most of the time, represent the things to us in shorthand. But given that these signs are in a necessary and constant relation with the things that they represent, the things that we have a constant need to calculate – without even noticing that we are doing so, as is the case with everything habitual –, we think we see what the appearances allow us, in fact, only to divine. We see only a surface, just a single two-dimensional section, and we think we see depth and relief; we see just about everything in an abbreviated form, whereas we think we see, at least most of the time, the forms and dimensions of reality. From visible appearances, which are only perspectival projections of things, we thus go back up without difficulty, and almost without noticing it, to real proportions, and consequently to the harmonies they compose. Visible appearances form therefore a silent language, whose organ is the eye, and through which the mind that has produced the forms, and which is expressed by them, makes itself present to our mind. But, among the different figurative arts, there are some that give to the forms they create the three dimensions of reality, namely length, breadth and depth; it is nature that subsequently translates these forms for our eye, just as much as with those that she has created herself, into the visual language of perspectival projections. These arts are architecture and sculpture.37 Another art borrows from nature and speaks this visual language; there is an art that offers in its works, instead of proportions whose harmony it wants to make us understand and appreciate, their appearances alone, their visible signs, such as nature would paint them in our eye. This art is painting, and it is the one that is properly called, when it is limited to forms without colours, drawing. And, indeed, since drawing in general is thus named because it represents things by their proportions alone, as by so many signs (disegno de segno, zeichnung from zeichen), drawing in the highest sense is what the one who – rising up to a higher



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degree of abstraction, and passing from the body to the surface – produces from the signs that the other arts employ these more abbreviated signs constituted by their visible appearance. Drawing, properly speaking, therefore consists in reproduction on the simple surface of a visual screen, like the one on which things appear to us.38 Since it is by light that the appearances of things become visible, there is necessarily in these appearances, in these signs, two elements: on the one hand, the lines and the points of which their surfaces are composed; on the other hand, the light that allows them to be seen; inseparable each from the other, they explain each other, and it is their connection that determines their perspectival significance. Indeed, light, emanating from its source, is distributed on the surface of bodies as a result of their form; by the difference of light and shadow, we can therefore judge the different angles of the surfaces. Consequently, if we see on a drawing any of the lines come together, do we have to conclude that the space they enclose between them is the abbreviated representation of a surface, which, in reality, draws away and back from us? The light, which illuminates it as much as a contiguous surface, is what apprises us of this. – By the same token, in this same drawing, do the different degrees of light and shadow indicate surfaces that in reality are more or less inclined, more or less distant? It is, in turn, the direction of the lines that apprises us of this. This entails the necessity of adding light and shadow to the abbreviated forms in a drawing.39 These are the two elements of perspective. In the end, the more distant that objects are from the eye, the more the different points of their surfaces merge together for us, and the greater the quantity of air separating us from them, the vaguer become their apparent contours, the weaker and the less clear become their apparent light and shadow. By these changes we judge, between the objects on which light and shadow are comparably distributed, their relative distance;40 the rules of these changes compose what one calls, by analogy with geometric perspective, the aerial perspective. Such are the necessary elements of this language of visible appearances that is the language of drawing.41 Thus, the real proportions of things are the principal object of drawing strictly speaking, as they are of all the figurative arts. The superficial images or projections of things, with the perspectival diminution of magnitudes, with their light and shadow and gradations, compose the language by which drawing, properly speaking, expresses and makes us understand real proportions. Yet this language, in distinction to the beauty of what it serves to express, has a sort of beauty of its own. The diminutions in accord with each other – these lines which disappear and draw back towards common centres of convergence, these successive diminutions of light and shadow, this gradual but equal effect of chiaroscuro – form derivative and secondary harmonies additional to those they serve to express. It is in this way that in the literary domain, though the essential and principal beauty

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belongs to the conceptions expressed, each of the languages which serve to express them has still its own beauty; it is in this way also that in music, though the melodic motif or the theme is the object and the goal of everything else, the different variations which make it appear successively in diverse aspects, and their very sequence, have their own quite particular effects and graces. But along with their beauties, perspective and chiaroscuro have their own difficulties; and these difficulties, though not of the same order as those relating to real or geometric proportions, the understanding of which is the basis of art, are no less considerable. It is not that the rules of perspective are more difficult to learn than any other part of geometry; it is no more difficult, when one knows the plan and the elevation of the object, to construct according to rules one of its visible appearances, than it is to determine, according to the laws of optics, the place and the degrees of light and shadow. But, just as tracing is not drawing [dessiner], drawing is not a matter of geometric construction according to formula. The only person who can really draw is the one able – without mechanical or scientific aids – to appreciate, to estimate the proportions of things, and who, to this end, needs only the particular sense to which they appear, namely sight, and the intelligence that judges by sight. ‘It is not in the hand that the compass belongs,’ as Michelangelo said, ‘but in the eye.’42 But, as soon as it is a matter of representing only their appearances, added to the difficulty of appreciating the real proportions of things is that of seeing these appearances as they are. Hence from the fact that we think we see, instead of the abbreviation of reality that visible appearances so often present to us, reality itself, to which we grant, by unconscious judgement, the dimensions that we suppose it to have, it follows that it is only with much effort that we manage to see simply the appearance as it is on the visual screen, such also as it ought to be in the reproduction that drawing has the task of making of it. Judging the geometric proportions of things, and judging the proportions of their appearances, that is, judging the modifications of geometric proportions by perspective, such is therefore, in sum, the double problem that the eye has to resolve.

Notes 1.

Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura (Rome, 1817), p. 11 and p. 29/Cod. 17, 31c. [Ravaisson cites Guglielmo Manzi’s 1817 edition of Leonardo’s text, but this edition does not refer back to the original manuscript held by the Vatican on which it is based, the Codex Vaticanus 1270. Here, after a forward slash, I reproduce the references to the Codex supplied by Dominique Janicaud in his edition of Ravaisson’s essay.]



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2. Della Pittura, p. 110/Cod. 602. 3. Memorabilia, III, 10. 4. Della Pittura, p. 90, 107, 110, 113/Cod. 502, 59, 602. 5. Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarotti, 60. 6. Poussin, Osservazioni sopra la pittura (Bellori, Vite di pittori, etc., p. 460): ‘Senza la quale (attione) inutili sono i lineamenti e’l colore’ [‘Without the latter (action), the outlines and colours are useless’]. 7. See Aristotle, Politics, 1, VIII, 5; Poetics 6; Pliny, Historia Naturalis, 1, XXV, 10. 8. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 113/Cod. 602. 9. Della Pittura, p. 78/Cod. 45. Michelangelo said: ‘Ogni pittore ritrae se medesimo bene’ [‘Every painter paints himself well’]; Vasari, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, Firenze, 1823, vol. V, p. 137. 10. Della Pittura, p. 191. 11. De Re ædificatoria (Paris, 1512), f.12: ‘Veluti in animante membra membris, ita in œdifico partes partibus respondeant condecet. Ex quo illud ductum est quod aiunt maximorum ædificorum maxima oportere esse membra, etc.’ 12. I quattro libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1616), vol. II, p. 3: ’Si disporranno in modo le parti che si convengano al tutto e fra se stesse.’ – Scamozzi, dell’Architettura, vol. I, 26: ‘Nella proporzione delle parti fa bisegno ch’elle siano convenevoli e corrispondenti al tutto’ [‘In the proportion of the parts, it is necessary that they are fitting and correspond to the whole’]. 13. Ars Poetica, v.23, 152 [‘In short, the work will be whatever one wants, but at the very least it must be simple and unitary’ (v.23); ‘that the middle is in harmony with the beginning and the end with the middle’ (v.152)]. 14. The Stoics. 15. Cicero, De finibus I, V, 28 [‘The last (propositions) respond to the first, those of the middle to both groups; everything responds to everything’]. 16. Leonardo de Vinci, della Pittura, p . 29/Cod. 31c. 17. Leonardo de Vinci, della Pittura, p. 11: ‘Queste due scienze [geometry and arithmetic] non si estendono se non alla notizia delle quantità continua e discontinua, ma della quantità non si tavaglia, la quale è belleza delle opere di natura ed ornamento del mondo.’ 18. Aristotle, Metaphysica, XIII, 3. 19. Poussin, Osservazioni …: ‘La pittura e piu intent all’idea del bello che a tutte l’altre, onde alcuni hanno volute che questa solo fosse il segno e quasi la meta di tutti I buoni pittori, e la pittura vagheggiatrice della bellezza e la regina dell’ arte.’ 20. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 16/Cod. 10: ‘Dalle quale proporzionalità ne resulta un armonico concento’ [‘From this proportionality result an harmonious accord’]; p. 18/Cod. 11: ‘La proportionalità, detta armonia, che con dolce concento contenta il senso’ [‘Proportionality, or harmony pleasing the senses’]; p. 19/Cod. 11: ‘L’armonica proporzione, la quale è composta di divini proporsioni’ [‘Harmonious proportion, which is composed of divine proportions’]. – Palladio, Lettera (Careggio d’artisti, publicato dal Dre Gaye, Firenze, vol. III, p. 398): ‘Dee il corpo con membri e questi con quello haver insieme armonica proporzione, e che

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da quello nasce poi quel bello che da gli antichi greci heurithmia vien detto’ [‘The body must have with the members and these with it a harmonious proportion, and from this results the beauty the Greeks named eurythmie’]. 21. Aristotle, Poetics, 9. 22. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 6, 7, 8, 14, 90, 204, 205, etc./Cod. 4, 5, 6, 9, 502, 131. Poussin, Osservazioni, etc.: ‘L’arte non è cosa diversa dal a natura e non può passare oltre i confini di essa’ [‘Art is not a thing different from nature and cannot surpass the limits of the latter’]. F. Pacheco, de la Pintura, su antiquedad y grandezas (Seville, 1649), p. 322: ‘L’arte imita la naturaleza’ [‘Art imitates naturality’]. 23. This is what Quatremère de Quincy misunderstood when he says that art has to represent not a man in particular, but man (Essai sur l’imitation dans les beaux-arts, 1823), a proposition which, understood in the sense he gives to it (after Winckelmann), is an expression of the theory, contrary to the thinking of the great masters, according to which, by means of the usurped name ideal, convention (from which what is called the academic style derives) becomes the rule of art. 24. Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 316–17 [‘I will invite him to turn his gaze, as a knowledgeable imitator, to the original model of life and characters, and to draw from these a living language’]. 25. See the works of Quatremère de Quincy, Töppfer, etc. 26. ‘Soleva dire Michel Agnolo Buonarroti, quelle sole figure esser buone, delle quali era cavata la fatica, cioé condotte con si grande arte, che elle parevano cose naturali e non di artifizio’ [‘Michelangelo was in the habit of saying that the only good figures were those in which the work had been effaced, that is to say that they had been carried out with such skill that appear to be natural and not artificial things’]: Gello, cited by Mariette in his Observations sur Condivi. – Poussin, Osservazioni, p. 461: ‘La struttura o compositione delle parte sia non ricercata studiosamente, non sollecitata, non faticosa, ma simigliante al naturale’ [‘The structure or the composition of the parts should not be sought be study, not be demanded, laborious, but should resemble nature’]. 27. Della Pittura, p. 19/Cod. 112. 28. Della Pittura, p. 24/Cod. 15. 29. Della Pittura, pp. 10, 15/Cod. 7, 92. 30. Della Pittura, p. 21/Cod. 13: ‘La belleza del mondo, la quale consiste nelle superficie dei corpi, si accidentali como naturali, li quali si riflettono nell’ ochio umano.’ 31. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 44/Cod. 26. 32. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 63/Cod. 37. 33. Vasari, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Florence, 1823, vol. v, p. 128). Cf. Vinc, Carducho, Dialogo de la Pintura, su defensa, origen etc. (Madrid, 1633), p. 40. 34. Della Pittura, p. 2 9, 32/Cod. 17, 19. 35. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 63/Cod. 37. On the diversity of judgements relating to beauty, see p. 91/Cod. 512.



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36. Leibniz. 37. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 41/Cod. 24. 38. L.-B. Alberti, della Pittura (Milano, 1804), p. 21. Leonardo di Vinci, della Pittura, p. 50. 39. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 47/Cod. 27. 40. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 258/Cod. 1622. 41. Leonardo da Vinci, della Pittura, p. 50. 42. Vasari, Vita de Michelagnolo Buonarroti, p. 128. Carducho, Dialogo de la pintura, p. 40 attributes to him also this dictum: ‘Que el habito de la vista bien enseńado suple la geometria y arismetica’ [‘That the habitual exercise of sight, well instructed, makes up for geometry and arithmetic’].

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5
 On the Teaching of Drawing We saw in the article ‘Art’ why we should ensure that drawing has a place, and an important one, in education.1 We saw, indeed, that taught as it should be, not only does it grant to a certain number of those who practise it some skill in representing forms, which is very useful in many professions and in many instances of ordinary life, but it also grants to all, to varying degrees, taste and a soundness of eye that are of universal utility. Here I propose to signal in what the art of drawing consists, and the method – in its principles, such as they have been exposed and practised by the great masters – that should be followed in teaching it. We name figurative arts those arts, as opposed to music, whose objects are figures or forms perceptible by touch or sight. These arts can, indeed, be divided into two: one produces forms drawn out in all the dimensions of space, while the other produces superficial appearances of those forms. The first is sculpture, within which, from this perspective, we may include architecture; the second is painting. It seems that the first of these arts relates to touch as well as (if not better than) to sight. In reality, there is no figurative art for anything other than the eye, which explains why, without the eye, human industry would be reduced to almost nothing. Through touch, we become acquainted with a form only part by part, by means of successive perceptions which memory then brings together. It is almost only for sight that a form can constitute an ensemble, and only in the ensemble does beauty (accompanied by harmony) appear, which is the most eminent object of art, as well as the character and essential nature of objects. Consequently, all the different figurative arts work, in truth, for the sake of sight, so that they could even be called the arts of sight. Nonetheless, this title specifically belongs to painting, since painting not only works (as sculpture does) for the sake of, and in support of, sight, but its work is also similar to the natural operation that is the condition of vision. This operation is the projection onto a plan of converging light-rays issuing from objects: a projection called perspective. Perspective shortens objects, in proportion to their degree of obliquity, and it shrinks them in proportion to their distance. It therefore alters the forms; but it does so by following an invariant law, by means of which judgement may then re-establish those forms as they are. By conforming to this law, painting lets us see things as they are seen by the eye itself. – Now, painting,

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abstracting from colour in all its variety, and thus reducing it to the representation of forms through differences of light and shade (called chiaroscuro), is drawing. Drawing is but simplified painting. So, since painting is akin to a language that serves to express visible forms, and since visible forms are the object of all the figurative arts, these arts are commonly classified under the name of the arts of drawing (arts du dessin). The one who draws, indeed, holds the key to all these arts. While perspective encompasses the conditions that drawing must satisfy, such conditions consist in deformations, and drawing aims to grasp and express forms by dint of these deformations. Perspectival deformations are the object of a science that the artist needs to possess, at least in its general principles. Forms are the object of art itself, the real object of painting and drawing, as well as of sculpture. Now, if one considers that forms are forms – at least those which deserve the name – because of a harmonic unity rendering them comparable to an organism, where everything works together towards a common goal, and that this constitution may also be found in every work of genuine architecture (because every veritable building looks like a living thing), we could then substitute the name of figurative art with the more pregnant term architectonic; a name that has been used by the author of Théorie de l’ornement, Bourgoin. Among the infinity of possible figures to which architectonic extends, there are some that we can define and measure. These are the simplest ones: the science that defines and measures them is geometry. There are many more figures, however, which we cannot reduce to their ultimate elements, and which we hence cannot reconstruct; of which we cannot give a perfect analysis, and, subsequently, a synthesis; and which therefore geometry does not deal with. Such are the figures of all living beings, perhaps even of all real beings. So if we find in them a certain regularity which seems to entail a certain geometry – and at bottom, the regularity studied by geometry must be a derived and somewhat diminished form of that regularity of superior forms expressive of life –, this will be a more than transcendent geometry, of a different nature to the one already at our disposal, and to which the latter does not initiate us. If some kind of reasoning is able to attend to it – and this is what both Leibniz and Pascal seem to have believed, as they implied that, in appreciating the sounds of music, the soul secretly counts the numbers contained in them –, it must be a sort of reasoning whose terms are indistinguishable, and which lies, as it were, in the depths of our mind, condensed, pressed into an immediate operation similar in nature to those of sight and hearing. In a word, since we can neither calculate nor rationally construct the figures of living beings (or of organized ones, which amounts to the same thing) in the same way as we calculate the figures belonging to geometry, we must determine them through an indecomposable act of intelligence that is completely different to mathematical deduction: an act that is called intuition (a word meaning sight), or judgement, or feeling.



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In architectonic, whose instrument and language is drawing, imagination encompasses an enormous domain, of which geometry knows but a minimal part – minimal with regard to extension, but also with regard to importance; and it is only on this part of the field open to art that science can replace it, or even must do so, in certain cases and up to a certain degree. Since the figures of living things present, like irrational numbers, proportions impossible to calculate exactly, it follows that – contrary to the claims of some – no operation of the exact science called mathematical science will ever construct exact representations of those figures and obtain certitude concerning them. According to some theorists believing geometry to incorporate the universal science, there is nothing exact and nothing certain outside of geometry. This was not the thought of those great geometers, Descartes and Pascal. The first made certitude rest on inner awareness; the second said, while speaking of certitude: ‘Everything ultimately derives from feeling’. Moreover, distinguishing the geometric mind from what he called intuitive mind [l’esprit de finesse] – which is identical, Hamilton adds, to the spirit of observation attending to realities –, Pascal explains how through this second and higher mode of mind we get an exactitude and a certitude in comparison to which those provided by geometry are coarse-grained. And, indeed, in this superior order of things, and above all with regards to its highest aspects, we encounter – with differences and nuances that are lower than all definable values and which therefore partake of the infinite – a sort of finesse that geometric measures are far from attaining, and which only the subtle tip of judgement that Pascal speaks of can reach. At the lowest degree of existence, in the mineral realm, the forms are of a simplicity such that it seems possible for geometry to attain them, while their mode of existence seems to be limited to merely mechanical and physical phenomena. Moving up to the order of organized things – where, in conjunction with organs that are in harmony with one another, functions appear of which those organs are instruments, and which coordinate an architectonic and directing principle towards a common goal – we see that matter, continuing to exist with the mechanical and physical properties, obeys more and more spontaneous movements, which are expressions of the will of the soul. At the same time, it increasingly adopts forms appropriate to those movements: forms escaping the grip of geometry, and which are doubtless expressions and images of spiritual properties, modes of thought and will. This is the reason why the soul, unable to understand the forms in a rational and discursive manner, grasps them with a single glance, as Pascal says, and with a view that somehow recapitulates – though with differences depending on the forms themselves – the profound awareness that the soul has of itself. Let us add that if forms, with material multiplicity conforming perfectly to the law of a dominant unity, come to express as perfectly as possible the intimate nature of the soul, which is love, then in that case, what we call beauty is manifest in them.

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The beauty of forms, Plotinus said, does not consist in proportions (as others believed), but in something that hovers above them like light from above; and this something, we will add, is grace, which resides in movement, and is the most direct expression of the will and its nearest image. Geometry is of some use in constructing, at least approximately, the kind of figures defining brute things, but it can provide only insufficient approximations with regard to living things, which are infinite and much more important. Such an approximation is, for example, the result of attempting to circumscribe within any sort of polygon the figure of a living being. Above all, geometry provides nothing that can help us apprehend the architectonic unity within living form. In the same way, even if we admit that physical and chemical phenomena suffice to explain the detail of what takes place within an organism, they by no means explain the synergy and unity of the whole. Now, while the forms of living things may still present mathematical elements, and these elements may have a role in the way forms affect us, what becomes more and more important as we ascend the scale of existence is not the material dimension – and the measures through which we can more or less imperfectly evaluate it – but the arrangement or order: something with which mathematicians are unconcerned, and which comes from a completely different, and much deeper, principle than number or extension. Following Leonardo da Vinci’s capital remark, we may say that mathematicians consider nothing but quantity, and do not care about quality, which (these are Leonardo’s words) constitutes the beauty and the ornament of the world. Qualities cannot be defined and decomposed like quantities; they are known only immediately by feeling, intuitively; they are the objects proper to Pascal’s intuitive mind. We shall add that two broad kinds of ideas can be distinguished, which Malebranche calls the ideas of greatness and those of perfection, following, as Pascal saw, a distinction between two modes of mind corresponding to them. In the same way, we may say that everything can be considered from two different points of view: the first could be called the logical, the second the aesthetic perspective. In this distinction, we find again the distinction between body and soul, or matter and mind, and then again the distinction, familiar to philosophers, between the objective and the subjective. If the physical world is, as Plotinus said, but the image and the shadow of a superior world of mind, so that the latter is the substance and the reality of the former – the latter concentrating, as Leibniz said, what the former disperses –, in the same way it is likely that the qualities yielded by the different senses (flavours, smells, sounds, colours) are but lower modalities or different materializations of that subtler quality of which beauty is made, and in which mind is depicted. If that is true, the aesthetic perspective, the perspective of feeling, although from a different elevation, is nothing but the perspective of beauty.



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The logical viewpoint is the viewpoint of science; the aesthetic viewpoint, or viewpoint of beauty, is that of art. Now, while the formation of non-organized things requires to a large extent – at least as it would seem – only external causes that form them bit by bit, in organized beings it is the whole that explains the parts, and the ensemble that governs the details. Likewise, the logical procedure characterizing science, most perfectly instantiated by mathematics, essentially consists in the formation of a whole from the parts, by virtue of a law that links together those parts in a sequential way, hence going from the detail to the ensemble. On the contrary, the aesthetic procedure, which is that of art, consists in grasping the ensemble at a glance and in deducing straightaway the details. Moreover, if science assists art, by helping it with sequential construction and the mechanical or logical procedures of verification, art assists science with conjectures or hypotheses, a product of the imagination, and which are above all an application of the aesthetic perspective: for it consists in an idea whose principle is harmony and its requirements. It is by means of the aesthetic viewpoint that science orients itself and discovers, as if it were looking down from an elevated peak, the ways through which it can better achieve its goals. Plato says in the Phaedo that if you want to know things, you should consider what they are when they are the best and the most beautiful. In other words, it is the ideal that discloses the real, and beauty that allows us to discover truth (see the article ‘Drawing’ in vol. II of this Dictionary). From the preceding, it should be clear that, although it pertains to geometry to define certain conditions to which forms are related, this is all it can provide to art. We could therefore say that though geometry has a part in masonry, it is excluded from architecture; or again that, though it contributes to craft, it remains beneath art. Thus physics and mechanics determine the conditions to which life is subject, which limit it and which manifest its negative element, but they have no role whatsoever – whatever materialism has to say about this – in the knowledge of its positive element, which is the proper object of physiology and medicine. Leonardo da Vinci has explained better than anybody else that the study of art must be preceded by a science of the geometric, mechanical and physical conditions that we have to reckon with: namely perspective, animal mechanics, anatomy. At the same time, he has explained that those sciences have an essentially negative and, as it were, protective utility. This great artist, who was at the same time a great thinker, said that science has in general the task of distinguishing the possible from the impossible. Imagination, left to itself, would lose itself in unrealizable dreams: science curbs it by teaching us what cannot be. It does not follow from this that science contains the principle of art, but rather that one has to study science either before art, or at the same time, in order to become aware of the boundaries within which it is obliged to remain. The error of materialism is to regard science as the principle of art, which amounts to conflating the condition with the cause, the boundary with the object.

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Leonardo da Vinci himself, who contends that the study of the so-called scientific principles of art precedes art itself, wants to make clear that painting does not come out of reasoning, but rather of feeling, which, at its greatest height (where imagination becomes creative) is called inspiration, and reveals the existence of a source above us. And he says: painting is not science, but deity. Raphael said, in an evidently similar manner, that the more he understood reason, the more he admired painting; that is to say, that the more he realized what science can do, the more he sensed the extent to which art outstrips it. These words come from the same artist who wrote at the sides of his image of Poetry: numine afflatur, it has been inspired by the deity. A Greek painter, in Xenophon’s memorabilia, tells Socrates these words, with which Chipiez ends his Histoire des ordres grecs: ‘There is doubtless in our art a good deal of things that human understanding can attain; but of the best, the gods have guarded the secret.’ We could add to this sentence – given that divine nature is spirit, and that spirit is grounded in will, and that will in turn finds its principle in love, from which all harmony and all beauty evidently proceeds – that the most perfect work of art, as well as the most perfect work of nature at the summit of the realm of life, is that which, through the highest harmony, reveals the highest potency: not of reasoning (which, as the man who founded logic admitted, is an inferior form of intelligence), but of that kind of love which is the divine itself. Thus if we appeal to the judgement of connoisseurs concerning what is a good drawing, we will find that it is above all a drawing in which the leading element is given its proper place and value, and in which, according to the vivid terms that are current today, everything is really ‘felt’, because the essential is brought to the fore; everything ‘hangs together’; everything is ‘enveloped’, meaning that the different parts hold intimate harmonic relations with one another. In such a drawing, everything calls out and responds to everything, somehow concurring in and conspiring towards the same goal. Finally, like in the most perfect organism, every part of such a drawing seems to be governed by a common will – or, better, by love, which has produced the whole, while letting the smallest parts partake in it. Drawing supposes, in its most elementary operation, to which all others may be reduced, a special kind of judgement, entirely different from that employed by mathematicians. This is what Leonardo da Vinci calls the good judgement of the eye. To be able to draw, said Michelangelo, is to have the compass in one’s eye. The geometer has the compass in his hand, as well as in his reasoning reason, as it was called long ago. The painter and the draughtsman [dessinateur] have the compass in their eye, and in that high part of reason which, both in the eye and in the ear, estimates, judges without reasoning. Consider this graphical problem: tracing two lines that relate to each other like two other lines before the eyes. For the mathematician, the problem amounts to the following: once the mathematical and, ultimately, arithmetical ratio of the first pair is found, the second pair can be drawn according



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to the same ratio. For the draughtsman, on the contrary, the problem means: without quantitative evaluation, without the reasoning of arithmetical deliberation, drawing two lines that, intuitively compared, make the same impression on the eye. In the first case we have mental computation; in the second, we have immediate intuition, an indivisible operation that, following an expression used by Pascal, is concentrated in a single glance. This glance is an act by means of which, when bringing together the objects into a whole, we become conscious of their harmonic relation. In the same way, when we compare two sounds through the ear, we become conscious of the sensuous ratio in the chord they form without any mechanical or logical calculation. Now, what is the means of acquiring the faculty of immediate and intuitive estimation from which proceeds the good judgement of the eye? Granted, in measuring with the compass in hand, one may end up acquiring some kind of inner procedure of calculation, a mental compass acting as a surrogate for the material one. Following this procedure, the graphical problem will be solved in a way that, to a certain degree, will simulate the intuitive procedure, and it will bear a similar result. But as soon as one goes beyond the simplest rectilinear figures, this method will begin to suffer from rough and uncertain approximation. One will be far from what can be achieved with a glance of the eye in that intuitive mind that Pascal has so aptly distinguished from the geometric mind; and any application of drawing will testify to this difference, no matter how humble its domain. Accordingly, the best way to learn to draw well any object will be to study those objects in which the qualities constituting harmony and beauty are found in their highest degree, so as to acquire, if time and ability allow, the principle and spirit from which they derive. In other words, it will be to study the types which have achieved the highest perfection that nature offers us. This is an example of the general methodological, and hence pedagogical, maxim, which Cicero formulated as follows: every genus must be studied in its most perfect aspects, in what occupies the first rank within it. By the same token, the best way to attain a good appreciation of chords is to train oneself to discern those forming the most perfect consonances, in which – within harmonic ensembles – the ratios constituting those consonances become more perceptible. Within art, invention – a product of imagination and, if it goes so far as to become creation, of genius – is distinguished from imitation. This distinction, however, is merely relative. Imitation is not art if it does not in some way partake of invention; that is, if it is not to some degree derived from imagination, and, we could even say, from genius. Pure and simple imitation, which is called servile, is not art, but merely industry, and a purely mechanical one at that. Invention, indeed, takes place by means of a principle that is developed by what one invents, an idea that the work realizes and in which is concentrated what the latter displays in detail, in the same

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way that the body shows in an extended form what already exists unextended in the unity and simplicity of the soul. The idea – which, indeed, is the origin of the organization of living beings, which all artistic creations resemble – is expressed by its form, or better, by the action through which the form is brought about, and which is therefore the goal and, as it were, the form of the form itself. This expression, which somehow announces what the object wants to be, and in which the principle of the creative will takes shape and becomes perceptible to the eyes, this is what is called character. If the principle governs the elements within its domain and lets them contribute to its aim, so that – pervaded by a selfsame breath, as the prince of Greek medicine said – they seem to conspire spontaneously, harmoniously, in the expression of a common thought, then the character becomes what we call beauty. From this we can see that beauty is the profound source of character, as love is the source of the will. Things, indeed, have character only due to a still more dominant unity, which, albeit weaker than the unity of beauty, is a sort of imperfect image of the latter. Even without presenting a perfect harmony, an object with a pronounced character is always in a certain accord and in a certain conformity with itself. This is what we observe in the works of nature; and it is what we must find again in those works of art that remain below genuine beauty. ‘In a figure that is short and stocky in its ensemble,’ says a great master, ‘all organs, arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers and toes must be short and stocky.’ Now whence derives this at least relative unity of every living being, according to which it is always more or less similar to itself in all its parts? Evidently from the same tendency towards perfect unity which, in a veritably beautiful object, better achieves its goal. Every species in nature attains, proportionately to how little its spontaneous development is thwarted, all the beauty that its condition carries. If the human species achieves a more perfect beauty than all others, it is because the organizing power in it is freer and more able to reign than in all other species. All living beings, a philosopher-naturalist (Aristotle) could say, are monstrous to man, on account of the more or less hindered and interrupted development of organs in them. From beauty, the highest object of invention and creation, descend all the degrees and varieties of character displayed in both the world of nature and that of art. Now, this principle, which, more or less powerful or weak, is what makes whoever owns it an inventor in art, this same principle is the veritable object of artistic imitation. True science does not merely seek what exists, but rather what must exist – not so much things, as the ground of things. Not even poetry, Aristotle said, imitates what is, but rather what must be. And what must be in the living work of nature or in that of art is the goal towards which everything conspires; it is the verb through which the creative principle is expressed and made perceptible. It becomes clear, therefore, that in order to imitate as art does, it is necessary to master the principle of forms possessed by the inventor, though to a lesser degree than the inventor himself. Consequently, although it is through imitation that one arrives gradually at



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invention, there is only one method genuinely enabling imitation: the one teaching us to imitate while striving to acquire from the outset as profound an awareness as possible of the principle of forms, the principle from which invention is derived. In contrast, the methods resting on pure and simple, or literal, imitation will be the least suitable. In other words, literal imitation, which proceeds part by part, detail by detail, and which is therefore absolutely separate and distant from imagination, will not lead to exact imitation, no matter what forms it deals with. If this is true, where else should we find the key to the relative unity of that which does not achieve genuine beauty, if not in the superior unity that shines in the most perfect beauty? If one wants to imitate objects that, though not properly beautiful, present a pronounced character, clearly there is no better way to achieve this than by acquiring, through the study of genuinely beautiful objects, a consciousness of perfect and supreme unity. Finally, if one wants to imitate objects without a marked character, the surest way to make a reproduction of them, through the judgement of the eye, in which the whole and the parts are in their right ratios, will be once again to find in these objects vestiges of that governing unity which, hindered in character, reigns without obstacle in beauty. To achieve this goal, however low it is set, the shortest way will always be the one that takes, as it were, the highest path. In mechanics it is demonstrated that the line of the quickest descent of a weight is not, as one might be tempted to believe, a straight line, but a certain curve. A curved line has to be followed to reach the representation of forms, whatever they may be, as quickly as possible: this is the line passing through the principle of forms. So, even to someone who, in the exercise of the industry to which he devotes himself, has only to execute the most modest of imitations, the best method to carry out this task well and as promptly as possible will once again be the method that all the masters have always prescribed. This method consists in studying as much as possible the types in which the unity impressing character on forms, and above all the superior unity of beauty burst forth. ‘If you want to learn to draw,’ Leonardo da Vinci says, ‘imitate the works of good masters, so as to become accustomed to good bodies.’ Some procedures furnish an entirely automatic kind of imitation, and do not require any kind of drawing ability. This is the case of photography. In the employment of such procedures, one has neither the need nor the occasion to appreciate forms and sizes with the eye. But nobody has yet supposed that it would be possible to learn to draw by means of photography. The same cannot be said for tracing. Since, after having first traced a model – either by means of transparent paper through which the contours of the original are followed, or by means of a grid through which the original is viewed so as to transfer as many points as required into the corresponding divisions of a similar grid traced on the sheet on which the copy is to be executed – one can afterwards depend on a less detailed tracing, it has been supposed that one could gradually come to draw, by passing through intermediate stages in which only the principal points would be traced, without any tracing at

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all. It is obvious, however, that in proceeding – as tracing requires us to do – from detail to detail without ever attending to the ensemble, the capacity for estimating the details on the basis of the ensemble is never acquired. Worse, one gradually becomes incapable of taking the path from the ensemble to the detail, which is the sole procedure of art, indeed art itself. Today there are few panegyrics for the procedure of tracing; but, under the influence of pedagogical theories giving predominance to the scientific and mathematical spirit over what might be called the aesthetic spirit, we observe everywhere a diffusion of procedures falling under the heading of geometric method. Either with regard to the principle on which they depend, or to the effects they produce, these procedures are ultimately reducible to the same artifice as tracing. They consist in beginning a drawing by tracing simple figures, figures that geometry takes to be the elements into which all others may be decomposed, and then gradually rising to the more complex figures present in nature. Such procedures can be reduced to two. The first consists in tracing geometric figures according to the rules of geometry, and this is what is properly called geometric drawing or tracing, sometimes also graphical drawing or tracing. The second consists in tracing the geometric figures not after some rule, but by sight, guided by the judgement of the eye alone. Of these two procedures, the first leads to exact results, but only in a limited domain, one almost always below the realm of art. The second, if extended to objects beyond the realm of geometry (and this is the main reason why it is recommended), leads to a poor comprehension and representation of them; and when applied either to these objects or to the lower ones, far from providing the means for an exact representation, it leads away from the only path leading to the discovery of such means. Some figures may be constructed a priori, following certain rules; they are the figures of simple (or at least, relatively simple) objects open to geometric definition. Consider tracing one such figure: from the properties involved in the definition, the lines from which the figure is derived can be deduced, so that the figure is obtained by means of a reasoned mechanism, without any intervention of the judgement of the eye. Moreover, the lines have to be traced with perfect exactitude; for a slight deviation of some lines (or even of just one) could lead to a quite incorrect result. This explains the necessity of making use of so-called precision instruments, which successively translate each prescription with perfect exactitude; and the resolution of the problem results from the complete execution of these prescriptions. As is clear, this procedure is perfectly appropriate to the outline of figures requiring mathematical exactitude. But such figures, though they have an important place in some sciences as well as in the arts and industries closely linked to them, occupy but a very narrow place among the infinity of figures to which drawing extends. Geometric drawing is therefore far from sufficient for the range of different needs that the art of drawing must meet.



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This is not all: geometric drawing proceeds at an inevitably heavy and slow pace. But even in the domain that is proper to it, namely the domain of simple and regular figures, one often needs (as happens in all other domains) swift and summary indications, such as can be provided without effort only by a hand guided by an expert eye; and it often happens that these indications are all that is needed. Geometric drawing, therefore, even where it is mostly appropriate, will not suffice. Ultimately, it does not suffice for itself. For as soon as the precision instrument is not positioned as it should be, in the exact place that it should occupy, an incorrect result will be obtained. Thus it is important and necessary that an expert eye ceaselessly controls the employment of precision instruments; it is important that the eye judges, even if only approximately and by estimating what is likely and unlikely, the results to which the instruments lead; and that it guides, as it were from above, the mechanism supposed to lead to the goal. This entails that geometric drawing strictly speaking cannot be placed at the beginning of the study of drawing, as happens so often today, and that, on the contrary, it should not be studied before one has acquired a certain ability in drawing by sight, or at least not before one has gained a certain soundness of eye [justesse de coup d’œil] through the practice of drawing by sight. So, apart from the value it may have for the understanding of geometry, geometric drawing cannot be considered as anything but an auxiliary method, suitable for the execution of works where mathematical exactitude is possible and necessary, or at least useful. The preceding reflections, presented to the Higher Council of Public Instruction, and subsequently, in a special commission established to submit to that Council an official programme for the teaching of drawing, had led to the dismissal on the part of public institutions of the system that made geometric drawing the basis of the general teaching of drawing. But an idea has taken root that the study of drawing, though it should not begin with geometric construction, or with the construction of geometric figures by means of instruments, should nevertheless begin with the imitation by sight of such figures. In the system built on this foundation, the drawing of purely geometric figures is followed by that of ornamental figures presenting simple combinations of the former; then by others presenting forms borrowed from the realm of plants, but diverging only slightly from geometric regularity; and it is in this way that, by gradually deviating from the simplest geometric elements, one finally arrives (but when?) at the human figure. This method maintains the three degrees of teaching that are ordinarily called linear drawing, ornamental drawing, and imitative drawing. These names involve a number of flaws, which testify to the confusion of ideas that they were supposed to express. Why should we accord the name of linear drawing, which etymologically means drawing with lines, only to the outline of geometric figures? Is it not possible to represent by means of simple lines the forms of a living being as well as a simple geometric figure? And why should we exclude the animal

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realm from ornamental drawing, while admitting the vegetal realm to it? Do not the ornaments admired since antiquity and the Renaissance bristle with representations of animals and even humans, as well as plants? Do we not find there the most diverse combinations – within fantastic composites of nature that are ornamental in the best sense of the word – of vegetal, animal, and human elements, welded to, mixed with one another? Finally, why should we restrict ‘imitative’ drawing to the human figure? Do we not imitate plants and animals just as much as man? Let us examine now the system that consists in basing drawing on the imitation by sight of the simplest geometric figures. Recall first of all that if the method in question here proceeds step by step from one part to another in virtue of the relation that geometry establishes between them, but without the exactitude that can be secured only by the use of instruments, nothing guarantees that this method will attain exact results. On the contrary, it cannot but lead to very inexact figures. Hence the name ‘geometric’ method is not appropriate to it, since it is by no means exact or certain, even with respect to the simple objects which are indeed constructed with exactitude and certitude by the genuinely geometric method. It should be called not the ‘geometric’ method, but merely the ‘pseudo-geometric’ method. Be that as it may, this system was born out of the idea that geometric figures are the constitutive elements of all others; which entails that, even in the forms of the things that are, at first sight, the furthest from geometric simplicity, it should be possible to retrieve those simple figures; and it will be by the assembly of the most elementary geometric lines and surfaces that art should be able to achieve the imitation of even the most perfect among natural forms. This idea was advanced towards the beginning of our century by Pestalozzi and his pupils, who claimed to ground education as a whole on the study of number and extension. It appears again in the work published in 1819 by the geometer Francœur under the title Enseignement du dessin linéaire, where he presented the doctrine – one that has become official doctrine – that linear drawing should be the foundation of the teaching of drawing. Francœur began with the idea, repeated by so many after him, that the procedure science employs to discover the properties of curves and their measure is to reduce those curves to broken lines or to compositions of straight lines. A number of works by ancient sculptors reveal the vestiges of this procedure, which consists in reducing all surfaces to planes, all lines to straight lines, thus endowing all forms with something square and angular. In the sixteenth century, it was known as quadratura, squaring off. Then a professor of drawing, Alexandre Dupuis, in a book published in 1836 under the title De l’enseignement du dessin sous le point de vue industriel, applied it to teaching, in that he proposed as models the use of embossed or relief figures reduced in planes – rough cuts [épannelées], as we say today. Through imitation of such models, similar to blocks prepared for a sculptor by



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an apprentice, one could acquire the habit of seeing the objects of nature as shaped in a more or less similar manner. The latter would thus become easier to imitate. Let us first note that ancient authors themselves refer to such practices in the works of certain sculptors not as meritorious, but as a flaw that may be explained by ignorance or the incapacity of a still fledgling art; a flaw that had better be corrected. Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, Quintilian are, on this point, unanimous. Let us also note that although we do find modern second-rank artists such as Luca Cambiaso make frequent use of quadratura, and though we can detect rare vestiges of it even in more refined painters, one will find that it has always been extraneous to those masters whose example exerts authority. In the many drawings left by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael, Fra Bartolomeo – and let us add Titian and Correggio – we find not the slightest appearance of it. Nature, indeed, which these great painters knew so well, does not justify such a technique. Though we might grant that the figures of cristals can be reduced to absolutely rectilinear elements (which it is permissible to doubt), it is certain that the same does not apply to any figure of a living being. In these we find not a single straight line, hardly even a circular line, but everywhere curves that go beyond the highest geometry. Thus, taking the immense variety of forms displayed by living beings, and above all those sinuous figures and sufaces, intertwined in all directions, which characterize the human figure, as reduced or reducible to the poverty of rectilinear figures, amounts to reducing to a quite inferior level the totality (or the quasi-totality) of the objects of art, and indeed art itself. It is vain to adduce that reducing curves to variously assembled straight lines is the ordinary procedure of science. In the first place, the geometer, by reducing a curve to a series of short straight lines inclined on one another, assumes that the inclinations are so feeble that they are imperceptible to the senses; here we have nothing comparable to the harshly angular figures of Luca Cambiaso, of Alexandre Dupuis, and of their sectarians. Moreover, the very idea on which scientific procedures are based, independently of quantity or degree, has nothing that art should appropriate. The goal of science is one thing, that of art is another; hence their methods are different as well. Only straight lines can be measured directly and exactly: to measure, at least approximately, a curve, we are forced to pretend that it is composed of a series of short straight lines inclined on one another. In this way, in order to obtain an estimation of the curve we destroy the idea of curvature. We thus come, as is said, to squaring the curves. But this geometric operation by no means authorizes squaring in sculpture or drawing. For the artist has neither the goal of discovering the geometric properties of curves, nor that of calculating the quantities they contain: his goal is to bring to light their visible character or quality. Far from denaturing forms, his task is to make their own nature manifest. Science may decompose its object to the point of destruction; art not only preserves, but in a

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sense augments as much as it can the characteristic idea of each thing, by purifying it of what distorts it, by unburdening it of what hampers or veils it. Augmenting, enlarging, is the aim of poetry and eloquence. Therefore, teaching that one should seek the elements of all forms, even the highest ones, in those which can be found only in, if at all, the lowest regions of nature, is not to put art on the right track. On the contrary, it is to lead it astray. A surely incontestable maxim says that, in order to know things, one must try to bring them down to their ultimate principles; but another maxim, which the founder of logic rightly adds to the first, says that every genus has its own principles, and that, before one looks for principles, it is necessary to differentiate the genera. Now living beings belong to a very different genus to lifeless things, and their forms are therefore not decomposable into identical or even similar principles. To search in the lower genus for the elements of forms belonging to the higher genus, amounts in fact to destroying the latter. The truth is that it is the lower elements that are to be explained through the higher – once simplified. Movement cannot be deduced from rest; but rest can be understood (following Leibniz) as movement infintely reduced. So the lower genus teaches nothing of the higher; the higher, on the contrary, explains the lower, and he who knows it knows also the other in principle. From this follows an undisputed and universally experienced fact, namely that whoever draws human figures also effortlessly draws all other figures: from those of the animals that are closest to man down to those of the simplest minerals, and to the even simpler ones addressed by the most elementary geometry. However, the most serious fault of the method that pretends to ground drawing on geometry is not that it falsifies our understanding of the elements of living forms. This method also bears the defect of being altogether useless for what is essential, which is to find the mode of composition of the elements, the arrangement of the ensemble; and this method even stops us finding it. The consideration of angles and straight lines as elements to which forms must be reduced does not encompass anything but the external details of the figure, i.e. the outline. But what needs to be established before turning to the detail is the whole, of which Horace and all the masters speak. Now, basing the study of drawing on the consideration of the outline means not only neglecting what should actually be the principle of such study, but also diverting attention away from it for good. What is more, amongst all possible ways of studying the outlines, if there is one less suitable than the others to lead to the comprehension of an ensemble, this is certainly the one that reduces the outline to broken lines, that is, to lines the most deprived of continuity and unity. The acquired habit of paying heed only to discontinuous lines cannot but make us unable to consider and grasp those great lines on which all others depend, and from which they derive. Even in the simplest representation of geometrically regular figures, it is the ensemble, the general character, and, as it were, the physiognomy, that has to be



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indicated first of all by means of a rough sketch. How much more evident becomes the necessity to indicate the whole from the outset as we approach forms more complex and more unitary at the same time, such as the forms of living beings, and above all that of man! How will the detail of the outlines – that we will have become accustomed to considering before anything else, trying to glean the greatest multiplicity in them – help to discover the unity of the ensemble in such forms? Also, if one follows closely the works of those who teach drawing by addressing first the detail of forms (and such are those who start with geometric figures), it soon becomes evident that they establish the ensemble – or construct the figure, as is often said – only with the help of reference points producing the basic proportions and situations in a wholly mechanical manner. And this is indeed the object of a fundamental precept in the methods for the teaching of drawing published by Francœur and Dupuis. In his Traité de dessin linéaire, where – as we have seen – he bases the study of drawing as a whole on the tracing of geometric figures, Francœur promotes placing in front of the model a squared grid, tracing a similar grid on the sheet on which one wants to draw, then tracing in the squares of this second grid the images of the points of the model which are visible to the eye in the corresponding squares of the first grid. Alexandre Dupuis, in his Traité de l’enseignement du dessin appliqué à l’art industriel, devotes a whole chapter to what he calls the exercise of the pencilholder. This exercise consists in placing the pencil-holder between the eye and the model, so as to trace horizontal and vertical lines in the air, and then taking note of the points of the model that are situated on those lines. This is a mobile grid, instead of a fixed one; but one that serves the same function, namely to mark out reference points on the model in an entirely mechanical way, so as gradually to determine corresponding points on the copy. This operation (the ‘grid method’) is identical to that of the pointing machine in sculpture. In that case, the practitioner executes a copy of an original, without being obliged to understand its mode of construction or its spirit in order to carry out his work. Furthermore, a curved line can be replaced with a number of broken straight lines (as those theorists have suggested with respect to the detail of outlines) only if the curve is considered either as inscribed within the straight lines or as circumscribing them. This, in turn, is possible only in implicitly relying on a squaring procedure, which is but a variety of tracing. So this method, adorned with the appellation ‘geometric’, and supposedly legitimized through the very example of geometry, comes down – at every point, from beginning to end – to the employment of a procedure that is not scientific, far from it, but purely mechanical. This procedure is subject to the verdict contained in these words of Leonardo da Vinci: ‘The custom of looking at things through glasses, transparent tissue, or paper, in order to draw the outline, and even light and shadows, is good and laudable for those who can draw, and who recur to this means only to reduce slightly the amount of work involved and not to fall short of anything in their imitation. But this invention is blameworthy for

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those who cannot draw by themselves, since being reduced to such laziness means destroying their own genius, and being forever unable to do anything good without such an aid. These people will always be poor and miserable in all their inventions and in the composition of histories, which is the goal of the science of drawing.’ But there is more: not only are such procedures detrimental to the spirit of invention with which the author of The Last Supper was concerned, they are of no use whatsoever, and cause harm to the development of the simplest talent for imitation. In the study of drawing, every time that the apprentice artist attempts to spare himself the trouble of seeking the real principle, which resides in the spirit of the form, by starting with the details (particularly if these details are reduced to the simplest conceivable elements, the fundamental elements of geometry), it will be necessary to construct the form by recurring either to a logical or rational mechanism (as happens with geometric drawing), or, if this mechanism is not at hand, to a physical machine – that is, to an instrument for tracing or for producing some such outline. In both cases, the eye and the imagination do not learn anything, since they are not trained to grasp the whole and the relationship of the whole to the parts, which is the very object of art. Hence neither taste nor talent will be developed. It is very true that in all kinds of study, in order to proceed methodically, it is necessary to reduce the object under investigation to its simplest principles, and that everything else must be drawn from the knowledge of these principles. Everything depends, as Descartes and Leibniz say, on the knowledge of the things that are the simplest and the easiest to understand. But in order to grasp the true sense of this maxim, it is important to understand what this principle is; what simplicity and intelligibility mean. It is assuredly a fundamental truth that, in order to know an object, one needs to resolve it into its own principles. Another and no less important truth – one formerly emphasized by the same philosopher who showed that the true principles of each genus are peculiar to it – says that principles are of two sorts, and therefore it should not be believed, like those who claim to explain fully a whole through its parts, that they are reducible to the detail of the elements, which make up the material side of things. For form, too, is a principle, under which the elements are assembled. Of these two kinds of principle, the latter is the eminent object of science and above all of art. In living beings, the principles of the first kind are not the broken lines of rectilinear geometric figures, but the flexuous lines characteristic of life. The principle of the second kind is a unity encompassing and governing all the parts brought to completion by these lines. This unity is something that seems to preside over everything else, because it is a visible representation of that invisible element on which, in the hierarchy constituted by the organism, everything else is suspended. Now, this principle that is form itself is as simple and intelligible as the other kind of principles that are its elements; and the former is in a sense superior to the latter.



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For the multiple elements are at bottom always divisible, and therefore only relatively simple; hence, they are only relatively intelligible. The unity of the form that makes a whole out of matter is the expression of an idea or thought in which is condensed what appears in reality as extended and dispersed. And a thought or action of the mind is the only thing there is that is truly and genuinely indivisible and simple, truly and genuinely intelligible. In mathematical figures, there is nothing comparable to the constitution of an organism (especially a higher order organism), in which everything is coordinated by a superior principle of unity. In them is to be found, together with something rigorously necessary, something indeterminate and inconsequential, which does not have that commanding grasp of the ensemble in which the different parts are given a necessary value and place. Beyond what is clearly regular in such figures, such as the equality of certain parts, or the parallelism of certain directions, nothing appears to the eye as motivated, that is, as comprehensible. And more or less the same can be said of the inferior forms of nature itself, as compared to the human figure, in which everything appears to us as determined by a law. This is a law not of a logical order, but one of adequacy and harmony, and thus of an aesthetic order; a law of which every violation surprises and shocks us. It is therefore in the figures of geometry that the principle of form is the most obscure; it is in the human figure, at the summit of creation, that it is the clearest. It is, indeed, in the human figure – especially if it is such as an inner awareness tells us it should be – that appears at its highest point of simplicity an ordering thought imposing the law of unity on elements whose very heterogeneity lets its power emerge. Thus, in order to be truly faithful to this grand methodological rule according to which it is necessary to begin with the most simple and intelligible, it is not with geometric figures that teaching should begin, but, following the practice and the precepts of all the great masters, with the human figure. Indeed, once sufficient time has been devoted to the drawing of geometric figures and of geometric ornaments, when we arrive at the human figure, as I have already said, it becomes clear that we have learnt nothing enabling us to comprehend and to express its unity. If, in contrast, we begin with the human figure, and are accustomed, by studying such a model, to grasp what an object is in which the parts are rightly proportionate to the whole, it also becomes apparent that things with a less perfect harmony also have traits that – though weaker and more obscure – are analogous to the higher harmony of the most perfect form. In order to understand, as Descartes said in a passage cited above, it is necessary to presuppose order even where there is none. But to be able to do so, one must have drawn the principle of order from its highest source. In order to study the character and proportions of those forms in which everything is (at least relatively) indistinct and indeterminate, it is necessary to look at

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them with an eye taught to recognize everywhere the merest traces of harmony and unity, thanks to the study of forms that are perfectly determined and, in a higher sense, regular. Beneath the abstract expression, appropriate to the intellect, of a unity encompassing and governing variety, sight and imagination, as we have already seen, find the organic form that expresses the soul. It thus becomes clear why Leonardo da Vinci said that the soul is the true object of painting, and that painting is a thing of the mind, cosa mentale. A consequence of these superior truths is that the most suitable method for the teaching of painting (or of drawing, which is the same) can be defined as the one which requires the spirit within us to embark on a quest for the spirit revealed outside us. From the mechanical procedure of isolating the points, with no distinction among them, of an object, Francœur himself distinguished the procedure followed when, in order to imitate an object, one focuses on the importance of certain points as opposed to others. The first method – which he nonetheless encouraged – conforms to the idea that the simplest forms, in which there is no line or point more important or significant than the others, are immediately graspable and help to grasp all the others, which are just more or less complex combinations of them. The opposed method, which presented itself to his mind for a moment without being appreciated in all its value, conforms to the idea that only what has the greatest sense and character is understandable and makes the rest understandable. In a philosophical mode, we would say that it is impossible to derive from inert and dumb things, as Leibniz says, knowledge of that which lives and thinks or even knowledge of these simple things themselves. Only in the light provided by the consideration of life and thought can we manage to develop ideas about life and thought or about what there is in non-living and non-thinking things that is nevertheless comparable to them. We should say the same thing in relation to the teaching of drawing: not only are the things without character and physiognomy useless for apprehending the rest, but they also provide nothing that would allow us to understand them. Generally speaking, since the lower exists and is understandable only by means of something higher than it, which alone is immediately and independently intelligible, only the higher provides the means for comprehending both itself and what is lower than it. By what is clear, we know both the clear and the obscure. Or, in the words of Aristotle, by the straight we know both the straight and the oblique. Some have distinguished exact drawing from expressive drawing as two different genres, claiming that the first must precede and prepare for the second. On the contrary, one should start by drawing the objects with the most physiognomy, those which most forcefully express the thought pervading them, the will that moves them. All the masters have demanded (Benvenuto Cellini testifies to this in the Renaissance) that one starts drawing the figure by the head, where the highest degree



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of expression can be found, and the parts of the head by the eye, the latter being the immediate organ of intelligence, or – as is commonly said – the mirror on which the soul is painted. Should we make at least one concession to the so-called geometric method, and admit that, at the beginning of a drawing course, it could be good to begin the study of form by training oneself to trace straight lines and rectilinear figures, independently of the study of scientific principles such as those of perspective? This would amount to yielding to the error. For the first impression received by the mind – as the best observers of human nature have said – is the most durable. A Greek adage, quoted by Aristotle, says that ‘the beginning is half of the whole’. If we look at the first steps of Greek art, steps in which the specific character of its genius first appeared, it is evident that they were not the cold and regular figures to which geometry is restricted, but imitations of living things, and of the soft and moving forms that are proper to them. Why, then, should we first impregnate the imagination with the idea of the poorest and driest of figures, to which it would always tend to reduce all others figures? However humble the future profession of the one who begins the study of drawing may be, however restricted a use he may make of the talent acquired by that study, the first model proposed to him should be the one the most suitable to impress on him in the most striking fashion the idea of movement, life, and grace. This theory – which, once again, sanctions the traditional method of teaching – is oriented by the idea that, according to a famous phrase, man is the measure of all things. And, indeed, not only does the human figure provide a general harmony repeated, although in a weaker form, by all the other figures existing in nature; even the forms and proportions, as the Greeks had already seen, of its unity and of its parts constitute a type, always present to our imagination, to which we reduce and estimate all other figures, and which art brings out and reproduces everywhere. Why? Doubtless because, as a result of relations of which we are aware within us, these forms and proportions respond to the constitution of our spiritual nature, which is our very substance, and of which we necessarily have a deep, although more or less obscure, feeling. If that is true, the human form explains all other forms because it is the visible figure of the mind. After these generalities, it remains to characterize more precisely, and in a way that is closer to practice, what in drawing should be the principle of unity. This unity, which embraces the different parts of a figure within a harmonic ensemble, shines at once in all dimensions, and within it, by means of a simultaneous and pervasive expansion, the creative power unfolds. Nonetheless, in order to grasp and render it, one tends to imagine it as decomposed first into surfaces, then finally into lines. Adopting this viewpoint, it is possible to say that the method of learning art is wholly reducible to attempting to trace the lines which involve in their development the greatest number of lines. These lines, which predominate in the works

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of Greek artists, as well as in the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, are, in technical terminology, the grand lines. It belongs, indeed, to the things in which unity prevails over multiplicity to appear grand. Grandeur is therefore a distinctive character of the lines that the genuine method teaches us to look for. Together with grandeur, these lines have another distinctive character, namely a particular form. Long ago, the discovery of this form marked the advent of true art; in modern times, the same form was described by the masters who contributed the most to its renovation. Forms are made for movements; movement is the aim and the ground of forms. Thus forms are beautiful, but movements possess grace, which is (as a poet has said) more beautiful than beauty itself. But there is more. If it is possible to consider forms (as often happens in geometry) as the durable vestiges of movements, as immobilized movements, one can equally say, it seems, that beauty is akin to the once mobile grace that has become fixed. This remark, we may add in passing, may help shed light on one of Leibniz’s ideas, which is as deep as it is strange, namely that the body is momentary spirit. In any event, if one looks at the grand lines that constitute the beauty of forms, one will find that they are the ones that constitute the grace of movements. Now, if grace is eminently an expression of abandon, which is itself the expression of the moral disposition that amounts to the supreme and truly divine perfection of spirit, the most gracious movements, named by Leonardo da Vinci the divine movements, are those which consist of alternating inflexions, without discontinuity, successively changing direction, as a kind of wave-motion. We can say that it was through the introduction into art of this undulating movement, the soul of all Hellenic ornamentation, that the Greek genius was revealed. This was the element that immediately distinguished its works from those of the peoples that Greece labelled Barbarians: works often admirable in other aspects, but always more or less stiff and rigid. These undulating movements, which had fallen into oblivion during decadent times, were signalled as the very principle of drawing by two restorers of art. Both characterized them by a name that the second among them often applied to the sinuous course of rivers, a persistent interest of his. Form, said Michelangelo, must be ‘serpentine’ (serpentinata). And Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Observe, in order to draw, the snakelike slithering of all things (il modo di serpeggiare).’ In other words, the secret of the art of drawing is to discover in every object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line, which may be said to be its generative axis, runs through the whole extension of the object, like one main wave unfurling in little surface waves. Why was such virtue accorded by the painter of the Sistine Chapel and that of The Last Supper to the undulating line? Perhaps because this line expresses better than anything else the character of a force that, yielding to obstacles, nonetheless pursues



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its course, as both pliable and immutable, like the soul is in the organism, which withdraws only to recover, and, amid the dispersion of its potencies, to regain the consciousness of its indefectible identity? Whatever the case may be, this sovereign line that commands all other lines, but which is revealed to the eyes only through them, this line that lets itself be divined rather than show itself, and that exists more for imagination and thought than the eyes, was named the ‘metaphysical’ or supraphysical line by an eminent artist of our epoch, while speaking to his pupil (the author of the present article). This amounted to crowning with an expressive term the theory of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Greeks. However, it is not enough to adopt as principles the true principles (in lieu of elements of a lower order than the one pertaining to art), and to consider them over and above all others. It is also necessary to study them in such a manner as to become their master. In our epoch, and in the hope of shortening the length of study, people are often taken by procedures appearing to lead to the practice of art more swiftly than the traditional method, by reducing the time which that method required for the study of principles. It is in this hope that the study of the peculiar elements of living forms (which can be mastered only in exercising the higher faculties) is substituted for the study of crudely geometric elements. Considered as common to everything, these elements were supposed to provide a general formula by means of which, in little time and without any great effort of intelligence or judgement, one would come to possess a sort of mechanism able to reproduce any object with an appearance of exactitude. I think, however, that we have seen the inanity of this idea. Furthermore, one could also be led to believe that, even in beginning with genuine principles, a superficial knowledge of them would suffice. This is not true. After having said that everything, in the acquisition of a science or an art, depends on the knowledge of easy and simple things (which are the principles), Leibniz adds that he is speaking of a ‘distinct and perfect’ knowledge. It is the same thought that Quintillian expressed in the following terms: ‘Let us establish from the outset and always maintain that one should write as well as possible; habit will provide celerity. Writing fast does not lead to writing well; it is writing well that leads to writing fast.’ And Leonardo da Vinci, speaking of the subject in question here: ‘Do not move from a first to a second thing without having fixed the first in memory and practice.’ And elsewhere: ‘If, o draftsman, you want to study well and profitably, proceed slowly, observe attentively, etc. And when you have attuned your hand and judgement to this diligence, the actual practice (that is, skill in execution) of the art will come to you without you noticing it. One must first of all be diligent, and then practical. If you go about things in any other way, you will waste time and prolong your studies’. So, the thought of the masters regarding method is that one should begin by studying the principles as profoundly as possible; that little by little, what first was

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a reasoned operation becomes a spontaneous and instinctive action, as reasoning is gradually reduced and condensed until it reaches instantaneity; and that in this way slowness insensibly yields to swiftness. This is what Condillac expresses in the following fashion: ‘once used to reasoning on your operations, you will reason in a flash.’ Consequently, not only should one select models in which the principles are most apparent (those, among representations of the human figure, showing the most clearly the forms and, above all, the movements); but one should also make an effort – particularly at the beginning – to grasp the specific character of both the elements constitutive of the detail of forms, and the overall line making a whole of this detail. Since forms unfold in the multiple dimensions of space, and constitute solids of which drawing gives but superficial projections, it would be an excellent practice – one that was in use in the best periods of art – to model with wax and clay before drawing and while one draws. Knowing profoundly the reality of things is, indeed, a condition that must be fulfilled in order to become capable of reproducing well their appearance. Contrary to what has sometimes been proposed, the first models can hardly be borrowed from nature. To say nothing of the variety of colours, which make their forms and chiaroscuro difficult to grasp, natural objects almost always present too many imperfections. Models will therefore be selected from the masterpieces of statuary, and in particular of ancient statuary. It is scarcely necessary to say that, among the most perfectly beautiful objects, one should choose – for ordinary schools and for the primary classes of the other schools – objects presenting not only the greatest simplicity, but also the highest degree of intelligibility. We must add, however, that for infancy and early youth one should choose, among the latter subjects, those whose beauty presents more a gracious and even cheerful character than a severe one. Play is the friend of infancy, says Plato; in Greek play and infancy are expressed by words with the same root, and according to the sublime author of the Republic and the Laws, it is by playing that children should learn. ‘Schools’, says Montaigne, ‘ought to be strewn with flowers.’ A beginner cannot understand mere indications, but only complete and perfectly determined forms. Therefore the masterpieces selected as models will have to be selected (especially at the beginning) from those works of Greek sculptors in which, while the ensemble dominates the details, the details are at the same time fully accomplished. It is on works of this kind that the student will be trained, at the beginning, to learn how the same principle constituting the grandeur of the whole remains identical down to the minute detail of the parts. In order to learn how to interpret and depict such models – that is, how to discern the simple principle from which all the rest proceeds – nothing will be more useful than to present to pupils (who are supposed to copy them) the drawings of excellent masters, which show with as much force as accuracy the difference between the



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essential and the accessory; and which show, most importantly, how one should begin, namely, following Leonardo’s precepts, by the summary indication of the ensemble, and, above all, by indicating the fundamental line of which the ensemble is the development. Now, a general maxim of method says that in whatever genre, once we have determined the genre itself, we should proceed from what is easy to what is difficult, and consequently, from the simple to the complicated; which entails that, when facing a complex problem, the first thing to do is to separate the different elements, in order to study them individually. On the other hand, the form of an object in relief is complicated by the perspectival deformation, which is hard to notice for a beginner, but becomes more intelligible on a flat image of the same object (see ‘Drawing’ in vol. II of this Dictionary). It is therefore obviously convenient, before approaching the imitation of models in relief, to imitate plane images, such as drawings. ‘If you wish to learn to draw,’ says Leonardo da Vinci, ‘imitate drawings first, then things in relief.’ To drawings one may add prints, which at the time Leonardo was writing were just starting to appear, but which are the equivalents of drawings. Despite what has been said about this, before Leonardo da Vinci the usual procedure was the one he recommends, and after him, it remained the usual procedure until those with little knowledge of drawing, breaking with a tradition whose deep roots escaped them, came to suggest that we go up a level – to use the expressions of Leonardo da Vinci – without passing through the degrees that lead to it. To help a beginner understand how a plane image of an object in relief stands in comparison to the object itself (to understand, that is, the effect of perspective), one could place before him, alongside an embossed image, a print, or better a photograph. And yet, for the reasons stated above, it is not the embossed image that should be copied first, but rather the plane one. Only later, according to both Leonardo da Vinci’s precept and the uninterrupted tradition of masters, should the embossed image be used as a model. Today, photographs have joined drawings and prints in the category of ‘graphical models’. If the photographs are well taken, they can advantageously replace drawings and prints. A photograph, indeed, can reproduce not only a drawing or a print, but an object in relief, or an embossed image, much more faithfully than any drawing or print. However, some have seen in this fact a reason precisely not to use photographs in teaching. The reason would be that photographs reproduce objects with an exactitude that some have felt justified to qualify as brutal, in that the objects are reproduced without the choice that every artist brings to­his drawing. But if no fault is found with a plaster mould reproducing exactly the marble on which it was moulded, why should fault be found in a plane image that translates an object in the round into a perspectival projection with no further change, and such as, in short, it is painted in the eye? Why would one want to subtract anything from

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the image, given that it is there only as a substitute for the great work in which, if it is well chosen, there is nothing to add or take away? It goes without saying that the photograph of a great work of statuary will not only have to reproduce it faithfully, but also have to reproduce it in its most favourable aspects and as lit in the best way to bring into focus its character and beauty. To arrange a model, to light it, is an art, since it is a matter of choice and taste. Light grounds everything else, by means of an operation that is no doubt mechanical, but whose result cannot be qualified as brutal, if intelligence has prepared and directed it. Things differ very much depending on the use made of it. Drawing reduced to a variety of tracing becomes pure mechanism. Photography governed by judgement and taste becomes what Leonardo da Vinci has said of painting, against those who ranked it among the mechanical arts. It too becomes intellectual, mentale. If some want to exclude from teaching even perfect photographs, which represent the originals with irreproachable perfection, may not the reason for this lie precisely in their complete and fully realized character? Among the ‘graphical’ models for drawing, many of those most favoured today present objects barely smoothed down, displaying the model by harshly opposed light and shadow, almost without transitions and without either nuances or reflections. So these models correspond to the system aiming to simplify forms by means of squaring methods or rough cuts. Exactly the opposite holds in the case of a photograph preserving all the subtleties and delicacies of a great work, and it somehow imposes on the one who takes it as a model the laborious obligation of reproducing them. But if we have understood Leonardo da Vinci’s precept, which conforms to all the great masters’ maxims, namely that models cannot be too perfect, we will see in the degree of accomplishment offered by photographs (that is, by intelligently executed reproductions of accomplished masterworks) a decisive reason to prefer them to all other models. Therefore, he who thought he could render a service to the teaching of drawing by establishing a photographic collection of models reproducing firstorder works of the most excellent masters, in their most favourable aspects and with the most favourable lighting, was not mistaken. The results of this enterprise have been signalled by two competent civil servants as something that could provide ‘very elevated teaching’ (Guillaume and Dufresne’s Report). Those summoned, on the committees of several international expositions, to judge the same enterprise were not mistaken either in declaring it worthy of an award on account of the service to teaching it indeed provides. The line of the whole that integrates the details into a harmonic unity is not the contour, but a sort of generative axis on which the contour depends, an axis that undulates in the three dimensions of space at once. It is therefore through the interplay of light and shadow, revealing the undulation of this axis in the model, that one will best come to grasp it. This entails that one should first of all imitate models in which the interplay of light and shadow perfectly depicts what is modelled; and



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furthermore, that in order to imitate them with more ease, it would be better – following common practice in the Renaissance, and as Leonardo da Vinci suggests – to draw on slightly tinted paper, whose colour will form the nuances, and on which light and shadow can be indicated with white and black. In the rendering of the modelled object, one should comply with the rule that Leonardo da Vinci formulates as follows: ‘Judge well what in the light, and to what extent, holds the greatest degree of clarity; and similarly, which among the shadows are darker than the others, and in what manner they merge with one another. Finally, ensure that your shadows and your light are conjoined without strokes or points, and that they merge into one another like smoke.’ After these reflections on teaching, a word on the teacher or master. The master, in the original acceptation of this word, was the person who, recognized as capable of practising an art, practised it with the assistance of fellow artists and apprentices, who learned by aiding him, and were his disciples while being his collaborators. Teaching in schools can replace this normal or standard form of teaching only within the limits of an initial instruction, a sort of elementary initiation. The sole effective education will always be the one provided by the master who, entrusted with a work, will let his pupil work with him and enter with him as much as possible into the secret of his art. And even at school, a master worthy of the name will be one who dismisses the allegedly expeditious procedures – which, after having denatured the objects through a delusory simplification, obtain the appearance of exact imitation exclusively with the aid of mechanical artifices – and indicates to his pupils the path already opened up by the great artists of all centuries (a path along which one advances only with the continual employment of the highest sort of judgement), and thereby imparts true theory to them. This master is the one who, conjoining theory and practice, is able to let them notice their mistakes and guide them with his advice, and who, capable of carrying out his own suggestions with his own hand, is able to provide the example together with the precept, often even before the precept. In summary, while science – at least science in a strict sense, which begins by definition and proceeds by demonstration – considers only quantity, art, like the superior species of judgement named taste, deals with the quality of forms. Reducing art to science would therefore amount to destroying it. Art, like taste, deals above all with the most prominent of all the qualities of forms, namely beauty, and it is possessed only by an organism in which everything is harmonically coordinated toward the same end. The characteristic unity in which the quality of form consists is most clearly visible in an organized being that has attained the most perfect beauty. It is therefore by studying the form of this kind of being that one will better acquire both the capacity, which is of very broad utility, to produce or reproduce forms, which capacity is what is called art, and the capacity, which is of universal utility, to judge properly all forms, namely taste. Today, two methods compete for the teaching of drawing, hence for the basis of all figurative and architectonic art. One of them is of recent invention,

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while the other is sanctioned by the authority of the great masters throughout history. The first, solely concerned, initially at least, with the material of forms, leaves aside judgement or feeling, which becomes sure only in its exercise, and aiming to replace it with reasoning and science, with the species of exactitude belonging to them, replaces the necessary work of the highest kind of intelligence with a blind and ineffectual mechanism. The other method, the only one that develops judgement since it is the only one that exercises it, consists in grasping by direct intuition, which is the highest function of spirit, the spirit translated by the form, and in continually connecting it to all the parts comprised by the whole, by means not of a logical deduction or mechanical operation, but of a sort of immediate and indecomposable estimation. The method of superior philosophy, introduced by the likes of Plato and Aristotle, was aptly characterized by Pascal when he said that there is a method that consists in always showing, without pretending to provide a rational explanation for it, the end on which everything is suspended. Such a method is the only one which provides the key to art, and which must preside over the teaching of drawing. Although all the preceding tends to confirm that the method teaching the pupil to render truthfully the most complicated and delicate forms is also the one that leads by the shortest route to drawing the simplest figures, in concluding this article it is perhaps useful to ask to what degree it is convenient to follow this method in elementary schools [les écoles de premier degré]; that is, in schools frequented by a population generally destined to professions in which, as far as drawing is concerned, there is hardly any need to make use of more than so-called industrial drawing. We shall not repeat here what was said in the article ‘Art’: the study of drawing should be seen first as constituting an important means of general education, independently of the technical use that can be made of it. In this sense, drawing teaches us, as Aristotle said, to appreciate beauty; in this sense, the Greeks demanded that drawing be among the first things, if not even the first, that all free children had to learn; and also in this sense one does not see why, in a society such as ours where slaves are supposed no longer to exist, the kind of drawing that purifies and elevates taste should be the exclusive privilege of a small number, instead of being taught, as far as possible, to everybody. We shall not insist on the inconveniences of all kinds that would ensue from this, and in particular on the injustice in laying down a dividing line, which would become insurmountable, between a multitude doomed to relative barbarism and a privileged class for which genuine civilization would be reserved. Nor shall we insist on the necessity that, on the contrary, everybody, at the fundamental levels of education, shares in those principles enlightening life and guiding it from above, whatever one’s condition. We shall not, above all, try to prove in this way, by means of one of the categories of teaching, a proposition of universal value, to wit, that the purpose of education, and in particular the purpose that public education should set for itself, is not so much, as has been said, to develop lower-order intellectual faculties, forsaking those of a more elevated order,



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but rather to arouse and cultivate the latter. We shall adopt solely the perspective of the use that drawing may have for the best practice of those industrial professions to which it is directly valuable. We shall begin by remarking that industrial drawing, or the drawing employed by industry, does not have objects specific to it; it is simply that, on the one hand, these objects involve more rarely than works of art strictly speaking figures of living beings, especially animals and man; and that, on the other hand, since they are fabricated mainly with a view to their utility, the same degree of finesse required by works of pure art, whatever their form, whose only raison d’être is beauty, is not demanded of them. In a word, there is no industrial art – or, as is more often said today, decorative art – with separate principles and separate method; there is only, below pure art, or art strictly speaking, an art in which the beautiful has to give way in some measure to the useful, and thus content itself with a lower degree of accomplishment and perfection. That being said, we shall not pause to prove that it is a duty not to deny to ordinary schools an education designed to arouse the elite minds they might harbour; that it is a duty towards not only these elite minds themselves, but also to the masses, the real interest of the latter being that it produce the highest number of those geniuses whose ideas are vital for the masses themselves. We shall limit ourselves to saying, considering only the immediate interest of those students of ordinary schools who will remain below the elite, that their interest would be poorly served if teaching in these schools was limited to geometric or linear drawing, which, able to provide only mechanical means for the a priori construction of certain regular figures, does not furnish – either to those students or a fortiori to the others – any architectonic principle, any principle of construction through the whole, even if it was limited to the drawing by sight of inorganic objects, or of weakly organized ones, such as plants, prone to so many variations that nothing compels judgement or regulates taste when we study them. Teaching an allegedly geometric squaring system as a recipe for replacing the study of the proper character of forms would, above all, be to serve their interest poorly since that squaring system actually debases them. Industrial works of art produced by workers habituated from infancy to conceive everything in this way would take on the same character, and we would no longer see those soft and gracious lines, hence that harmony of colouring, which used to give much value to the products of French industry. Stamped by a sort of barbarian harshness similar to that which affects Mexican architecture, for all decoration they would at the same time be reduced to ornaments excluding any representation of movement and life, in which there would not even be found those indefinitely varied creations characterizing the oriental imagination, but only the monotonous development of cold mathematical combinations. For centuries, French industry has distinguished itself from all others by the elegance of its forms and by its ingenious richness of decoration. If it ended up

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losing, under the influence of the method of drawing that some want to impose on it, the qualities that had won the favour of the greatest part of the world, its glory would suffer, and one of the most abundant sources of its prosperity would be deeply affected. Therefore, if the teaching of drawing were as what should be called the pseudogeometric school proposes, far from wishing, as one does, that it find its places in all schools, one would wish that it find no place in any school at all. Finally, even if practices deriving from the pseudo-geometric theory are not introduced in elementary schools, and it is indeed recognized that there as everywhere else, it is by the ensemble that one has to learn to draw objects, should one remain with those things of an inferior nature that are most often the objects of industry? As we have seen above, this would be like trying to achieve the goal while avoiding the best and fastest route leading to it. Although in the school for industrial art founded in the last century by Bachelier, students were imparted at the outset with geometric notions that were to guide them, the first model that was presented to them – whatever profession they were destined to – was the human head. And since the human figure is indeed the object whose study leads better than any other to grasping visible harmonies, hence to judging exactly ratios among magnitudes and the magnitudes themselves, it is the human figure that should be drawn from the outset in primary schools, no less than in other schools. The difference, in this respect, between elementary schools and higher ones, is that in the latter the human figure will be studied at greater length and therefore in greater depth. Yet however little time it is possible to dedicate in primary education to the study of figure, in this little time devoted to extracting the principle of drawing from its purest source more will have been learnt for the precise drawing of ornaments, furniture, or the most elementary utensils, than if the time had been used drawing nothing but objects of this genre. The first thing to do, in any case, in order to establish the teaching of drawing in a school of whatever degree, will be to supply it with a certain number of reproductions – casts, engravings, or photographs – of masterpieces of the highest order, capable of awakening the idea of perfect beauty in the pupils’ minds. The first schools were probably temples, in which the lessons derived from the divinity. Even today, each school should be like a temple: a place in which, prior to any lesson, one should somehow receive an impression of the divine; a place in which everything works together in awakening from the outset that sentiment which, according to the ancients, is the beginning of all science, namely admiration. Surrounded by objects so perfect that they are worthy of being described as divine, pupils of the humblest schools, should they lack the time to imitate them with exactitude, will nevertheless gain from those objects, even without noticing it, instruction by virtue of which they will see better, throughout their lives, the difference between beauty and ugliness, and therefore between good and evil, and truth and falsity.



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Note 1.

[As noted in the Editor’s introduction to this volume, Ravaisson contributed not only the present essay to Buisson’s Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, but also one on ‘Art’ in vol. I and another on ‘Dessin’ in vol. II.]

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6 The Venus de Milo The Venus de Milo, such as it was exhibited, offered the appearance, not only of a disdainful pride, but also of a quasi-masculine vigour; the pride by its attitude, the vigour by certain characteristics of its forms. And one often praised it without distinguishing, as often happens in the presence of a beautiful object, what constitutes its beauty from what is foreign to it. A famous philosopher, relying on this great example, found it possible to say of beauty in general, without taking into account the difference of the sexes, that its essence is force, and this theory has now more than a few partisans. The ideas of the ancients, however, were quite different. Cicero says, and he is here, as in so many other respects, an interpreter of the Greeks: ‘There are two different genera of beauty, the masculine consisting in dignity, the feminine in venusity’; venusity, and that is to say, grace and delicacy; and these were, as the word suggests, the attributes par excellence of Venus, the ideal of feminine beauty. Hence, one finds very few ancient Venuses that are not distinguished by these characteristics. That the Venus de Milo should have appeared to present quite different characteristics is the result of a defective installation guided by an erroneous interpretation; and it is the best proof, together with the imperfections of the statue that Quatremère de Quincy pointed out, that this interpretation is misguided. Some critics, struck by the elements of the Venus de Milo that are incompatible with the essential character of Venus’s beauty for the Greeks, have proposed that she is another divinity, Victory, for example. But, without dwelling on the point that the Greeks never represented Victory with a virile air, the great number of reproductions or variations of the statue from Milo associated to a Mars is certain proof that she is indeed a Venus. The head, moreover, as one notices straightaway, looks much like that of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, such as it is reproduced by the many extant copies of it, and in the physiognomy – whatever may be the prejudice giving rise to the attitude that has been impressed on the whole – there is still more gentleness than in the Aphrodite of Knidos. And the same applies to the reproductions of the head found in Tralles and Pergamon.

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So if an apparent pride has been seen in the Venus de Milo that would not sit well with the idea that the Greeks had of the goddess of love, this is uniquely the result of the defective bearing imposed on her. After having discovered the change to which the bearing of the Venus de Milo had been subject in the workshops of the Louvre, I limited myself to averting the public of this, and I left the statue as the public had become accustomed to seeing it. It was necessary, as it seemed to me, to give the critics time to check the facts and to free themselves from already inveterate presuppositions. After several years, when repairs to the Museum of Antiquities meant that the Venus was put into storage, I seized the opportunity to take away the unfortunate wedges placed between her two halves, and to give her original bearing back to her. The haughty air generally found in her thus disappeared, and it was possible to recognize in her movement the goddess that she represents. Vera incessu patuit dea.1 As for the Venus appearing to have a quasi-virile vigour, which has so often been celebrated, to make it disappear it was enough to orient the marble as it was supposed to be oriented, and thus to present it to the viewer in the way that the author of the statue had intended.2 In ancient art, with the aim of expressing a heroic nature, the forms best able to give the idea of power were privileged, and they were sought in feminine as well as masculine figures. In both cases, the breast was made very ample, and the waist broad. This did not prevent, in the early periods, a constant search for elegance and grace together with force. Something remains in the Venus de Milo – an imitation, as we will see, of a type produced in the high Classical period – of the force of primitive figures. At the same time, by following maxims of the old style, the forms, considered in profile, have a slenderness that they do not present from the front, an elegance that was increasingly attained, but which had been sought from the beginning. Statuary seems to have its origin with the Greeks in what was called the art of tracing, grafikh&; an art that, as the oldest painted vases give us reason to believe, perhaps originally sought to represent shadows, because the gods and sprits were imagined to be like shadows, and because the sole subject matter of art was, it would seem, things divine and heroic. Art of tracing and art of representing shadow were originally synonymous,3 and shadow, soul and image were synonyms.4 This is why in distinguishing itself from painting, statuary seems to have first produced figures which gained solidity only gradually. On the Greek islands, particularly Amorgos, striking examples of this beginning and this development have been found. The bodies formed in this way, broad from the front, at least in their upper parts, the seat of noble life, were very slight in profile. Traces of this way of going about things remain in most of the repetitions that we have of the type reproduced by the Venus de Milo; it can be seen above all in the one belonging to the Museum of Madrid, which seems to be the most ancient of all, and which, either by the clothing or by



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the style, derives from the century of Pericles or from the beginning of the one following it. If, therefore, within a century when one began to desire that a Venus offered in its forms, and not only in its physiognomy, the characteristics distinctive of the perfect beauty of a woman, the creator of the type reproduced by the Venus de Milo sought to give to her the elegance belonging to such a goddess more than to any other, then he could do this while conserving the weightiness of the old style; for this, in the work, it was enough that she was seen in profile. And it is in this way that this type can be considered as representing the transitional moment that prepared the way for Praxiteles to create in his Aphrodite of Knidos, deliberately intended to be viewed from all sides, the accomplished ideal of feminine beauty, purified of any remainder of virile nature. Moreover, in the Venus de Milo, the torso, slightly inclined forwards, is turned more towards the left than the lower part of the body, and the head still more so than the torso. To the elegance resulting from its slenderness, there is thus added the grace resulting from this movement of torsion.5 The goddess can be recognized in this moment that develops in transforming and losing itself. In the famous passage where Virgil describes Aeneas’s mother, who appears to him as Diana, subsequently revealing herself to him as what she really is, the poet says: avertens, vera incessu patuit dea.6 In the movement by which she turns away and hides herself there unfolds the grace – more beautiful than beauty itself, as another poet said – that is the attribute proper to Venus. The result of these considerations is that the Venus de Milo offers the particular qualities of the goddess that it represents only if it is considered as it was supposed to stand on the right hand side of a group, that is to say in such a way that it is seen from its right side, and turning towards its left. Finally, what teaches us more than anything else about the aspect for which the Venus de Milo was made is the expression of the physiognomy. This expression, that one has often signalled as being of a disdainful pride, is, on the contrary – when above all the head is well illuminated by daylight falling from the sky, which it is not in the Museum – that of gentleness and kindliness united with dignity. The true interpretation of the Venus de Milo would have been found earlier, if, in order to understand it, one had remained with the principal element, which is the physiognomy, to which everything else is tributary, and if one had considered the wise precept: consider the purpose, respice finem. A final consequence to draw from all the preceding is that if the restitution of the Venus de Milo is what it ought to be, then the statue, so rightly admired for its rare beauty, will have to manifest a still greater beauty than had previously been seen in it, since it will manifest it through the sides with which the artist attempted to bring it to perfection, but this is still the sort of beauty, the most excellent of all, that ancient art attributed to Venus.

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From the statue itself, let us move on to the base that supports it, and then to the fragments discovered in the same area. In the Museum, another small base brought back from Milo at the same time was originally attached to the Venus’s base, but later there was a change of heart. Indeed, the Venus’s base, very narrow on the left-hand side, and beyond which the left foot extends, offers, from this side and from below, a bevel clearly supposed to meet another of the same but opposed inclination; for, while the edges of this bevel are carved with a chisel, it is, in its middle, carved with a claw, and it is in this way that a piece of marble was prepared on which another was to be applied, because it is the means of ensuring that the application is perfectly exact. The small base brought to the Museum with the statue presents this second bevel, and consequently must have formerly been attached to the Venus’s base. It was reattached to it in the restoration workshop. The small, additional base bears an inscription with the signature of an artist born in Antioch, near Meander. The first letters of the artist’s name are missing; the name, which was thought to be that of the sculptor of the statue, therefore could not be established with any certainty, but it was thought that with its indication of his birthplace, the inscription provided, if not the date of the work, then at least the date beyond which it could not be traced any further back. Antioch, indeed, was founded only about 300 years before our epoch.7 This subverted one of Quatremère de Quincy’s conjectures, who had proposed the attribution of the Venus de Milo to Praxiteles or to one of his students. Later, however, recognizing that the additional base did not belong to the original composition, this arrangement was repudiated, as were, consequently, the consequences that had been drawn from it. And, indeed, first of all, the small base is neither of the same marble as the Venus’s base, nor of the same height, and it did not seem possible to suppose that the author of the statue had wanted to join together pieces that were harmonious neither in matter nor form. Secondly, in attempting to restore the left foot of the Venus, which had not yet been carried out, as can be seen on the engraving published by de Clarac, it became apparent, when the small additional base was put together with the bigger one, that the foot projected beyond the former. It was then, as de Marcellus said in his Dernier Mot on the Venus de Milo, that the decision was taken to remove it. It was clearly to adjust it to the Venus’s base that the additional base had been refashioned, in sacrificing the first letters of the inscription; but it was possible to do this only in barbarous times. Moreover, on de Clarac’s engraving, an engraving executed according to an exact drawing by Debay, son of the one of the sculptors in the restoration workshop, it is evident that the meeting line of the two bases is irregular; and as the bevel of the principal base is perfectly regular, one has to conclude that the bevel of the small additional base was irregular, carrying thus the mark of poorly executed work, in an epoch, perhaps, of profound decadence.



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Finally, Voutier’s newly rediscovered sketches came to teach us that the small additional base belonged to one of the two herms found with the Venus. It was with them when Voutier drew it, and the print published by de Clarac shows the square hole in which the lower part fits. Clearly, during an attempt at restoration, at a time when the annexed base carrying a second object had been separated from the statue, this base was replaced by one readily available, one supporting a herm to replace the object that the annexure had formerly supported. In the sides of the two herms found with the Venus there are rectangular cavities, the same cavities very often to be seen on cippi of this type, and which served, as shown by paintings found in Pompeii, to receive horizontal bars by which they were attached to similar cippi. Barriers were thus formed in which quadrangular herms served as posts. Perhaps, then, the two herms found with the Venus formerly had their place in a barrier surrounding her. Whatever the case may be, what is certain is that one was taken to be restored, and later both were transported with the statue to the hiding place where she was secreted, in the hope, perhaps, that a day would come when they could be used in a new restoration. That a restoration of the Venus de Milo was attempted in an epoch with corrupted taste is what is proved by the remaining traces of metal, probably gold, ornaments with which she had been adorned. A bracelet had been fixed to the right arm. The proof of this is the holes formed there in which the pegs that held the bracelet were to be fixed. The thing is, although there are many statues of Venus with a bracelet fixed to the arm, this ornament, in the high periods, is only ever placed on the left hand. The headband around the hair also bears holes indicating that a diadem had been fixed on it with pegs: it really is only in barbarous times that one could have thought to place, after the fact, a metal diadem on a headband. Around the same time as I had had removed the wooden supports placed between the two halves of the statue, I also had removed the false base, in which the original base had been sunk, and a round one was substituted for it, which allowed the critics to discover without hindrance the best orientation of the statue. Moreover, I had the back and the right-hand side of this new false base cut out, so that it showed, in all the details that I have just related, the original base. This arrangement is only provisional. When the facts whose study has been facilitated by this arrangement are well established, by general consensus, it will be time to replace it by a different one of a happier aspect. In any case, not only does the Venus’s base present on its left side – a side that is bevelled, as I said – the effect of a toothed chisel indicating that another piece of marble was to be applied to it, which could be nothing other than a second base, the base of another object, but the hollow thus formed on its left side is also continued on its front, all the way along this side. This is proof that the annexed base fitted to it extended beyond it on its front, and it must have been made to provide a support

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for the left foot. Given that it was so deep, it is right to think that the annexed base was proportionally broad, and that, consequently, the object that it carried was of great dimensions, such as is the second figure with which, on so many ancient monuments, a Venus similar to that of Milo is grouped. Finally, the second base projecting beyond the first, it was necessary that a false base enveloping both came to resolve this difference. And, indeed, the Venus’s base presents on its rear the same hollowing out in the middle, but not the edges, which on a piece of marble indicates, once again, that another piece was to be applied to it. An ample false base had both to mask the junction of the two bases and to make up for their differences in projection, and also to give the whole base a rectangular form, one possessing the desirable regularity, and whose vertical rear surface, this surface being perpendicular to the line of vision going from the eye of the spectator to the group, was such that the whole, from the most favourable position, faced the spectator. As for the fragments brought to the Louvre with the statue, some are not worth dwelling on since it is immediately evident that they can in no way have belonged to it. They are a foot within a buskin which, besides, is no longer in the Museum, and a fragment of a lower right-arm that I rediscovered in the Museum, and that I had placed close to the Venus, but which is, as I have already said, of a different marble and greater proportions. It is likely, since these fragments correspond, in what they represent, to missing parts of the statue, that they had been collected so that something could be learnt from them during the restoration. The same does not apply to the mutilated left hand holding an apple and to the fragment of left arm. In the light of his approach to the statue, Quatremère de Quincy thought the hand in question to be inferior in quality to the statue, and, consequently, he thought it the work of a former restorer. Several other critics have shared this opinion, and I accepted it in my notice of 1871. Since then, attentive examination has led me to the opposite view. Not only is the fragment in question of the same marble and the same proportions as the statue, but the quality of the work is, in truth, identical. It is true that there are some negligent aspects; but this is easy to explain, while still attributing it to the author of the Venus, if one considers that parts of the statue not supposed to be seen are just as neglected, and if it is also admitted that the left hand is supposed to be, mostly at least, out of sight for the spectator. Now, first, as Lange, sculptor and head of the restoration workshop in the Museum, had already remarked, the top of the hand, on the side of the thumb, bears lesions that continue, to so speak, on the underside of the arm, and which, consequently, must have been produced by the same cause, at a time when the hand was attached to the arm in such a way that their upper surfaces were on the same level. And, second, the arm was fixed to the shoulder, as I have already noted, by a metal tenon whose form is indicated by two matching cavities in the shoulder and upper arm. The arm, whose



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work is incontestably just as irreproachable as that of the best parts of the statue, belonged to it, therefore, and, consequently, so too did the hand holding the apple. How was this hand placed, and what role did it play in the composition? Must it and can it be thought, following all those who accepted that it belongs to the statue, that it was held in the air in order to show the apple? To such an idea it is enough first of all to oppose the observation of Quintilian concerning the action of oratory: ‘Gesticulating with the left hand alone will never work for anyone.’ And, indeed, action, at least the principal action, always belongs to the right hand. How could one attribute to the goddess of beauty and grace a gesture contrary to nature and essentially ungraceful? Second, when one grasps an object in order to show it, one always does this with the first fingers helped by the thumb. But it is by the last two fingers that the hand in question holds the apple. The goddess to whom this hand belonged was not, therefore, showing the apple; she was holding it, as Kékulé suggested, carelessly, as if it were a mere attribute. From the study of the hand and arm, furthermore, the true position of the hand can be deduced, the position that the part of the statue whose elaboration is slightly undeveloped does not enable us to see. If the hand had been raised in the air without anything supporting it, the forearm, the biceps would have been tensed. But the arm is relaxed. The part of the left arm that has disappeared and the left hand should, then, rest on some kind of support. Furthermore, close to the fold of the arm, the flesh of the arm flows backwards, in forming a roll that can be explained only by the pressure of the forearm inflected at more or less of a right angle in relation to the upper arm. And the direction of the forearm resulting from this flexion is such that the wrist ought to find itself at the height of the left shoulder and at a distance from this shoulder of less than thirty-five centimetres. With all this in mind, no hypothesis seems to respond better to the question of what supported the wrist and hand than that to which other circumstances, as we have seen, had led, namely that it was the shoulder of a second figure next to her, of the same height, upright and to the left of the goddess. The hand would have rested on the outer edge of this shoulder, and, consequently, would have been visible for the spectator only by the thumb and fingers, which, as projecting forwards, were destroyed, and about which nothing proves that their execution left anything to be desired. In the end, with such an arrangement, the upper surface of the hand on the side of the thumb, the surface that is worn and damaged, would have been, as I said above, on the same level as the part of the surface of the arm offering quite similar lesions. In this way, Quatremère’s objection dissipates, and Lange’s opinion is verified, but to the profit of a theory closer to the system proposed by the former than that held, with others, by the latter, a theory that Quatremère de Quincy, if he were more completely informed, would surely have accepted.

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Should one admit, indeed, following Dumont d’Urville and the partisans of either of the two opposed systems, that the apple, in the hand of Venus, could serve only to recall the prize awarded ‘to the most beautiful’ by Discord? This is an inadmissible supposition. Preunder and Frankel have rightly observed that the legend of the judgement of Paris does not go back any further than the Hellenistic period, and that, consequently, it cannot be put into service for the interpretation of a monument such as the Venus de Milo, a production, clearly, of a more ancient time. For the apple held by the Venus de Milo, we have, therefore, to search for another meaning than that of the prize for beauty won on Mount Ida. In the most ancient times, a fruit was often placed in the hands of several goddesses, but above all in that of Venus. Polycleitus’s Juno, in Argos, held a pomegranate in her hand; the Venus by Agoracritus, Phidias’s favourite student, held a branch from an apple tree. The Venus Genetrix, of which the original was probably, as we will see, one of Phidias’s own works, and which is, in any case, a work of his time, holds in her hand an apple. In these different statues, the fruit in the hand of the goddess signified, whatever fruit it was, felicity and fecundity; and such was the sense of the fruit, above all, in the statues of Venus, at least as they were understood in the Classical periods. Greece, in its early days, loved in its Aphrodite a deity that it named Urania or ‘the Celestial’. To the idea of this deity it attached first of all that of beauty, whose cult distinguished the Greeks from all the other surrounding peoples; but probably the deity herself came to the Greeks from Asia, where Astarte, the greatest of the goddesses, was called ‘queen of the sky’. The sky, in the most ancient tongue, was not the part of the world stretching out above the sky, but rather the world as a whole, of which the earth was, following the oldest doctrine, the primordial part, origin of all the rest. Everything was born from the earth, permeated, in truth, by a spirit of life personified by the Venus Urania. Thus this goddess was called ‘mother of all things’. She was thus close to being confused with the Phyrgian deity of the earth, Cybele, who was commonly called the Good Mother or the Great Mother. Queen of the infernal or subterranean regions, the original site of the residence of the gods, as well as that of souls, which emanated from it and came back to it through death, at bottom she was nothing other than the goddess named in Greece Pherephatta and Persephone, and in Italy Proserpine, and who was probably only a reduplication of Ceres, also goddess of the earth.8 In the infernal world, the home of the sovereign was called the Elysium, in delightful shadows. It was here, according to the legend reproduced by Virgil, that Proserpine tasted a pomegranate whose savour made her forget the earth from which Pluto had stolen her, and to which her mother Ceres called her back. Pluto himself – to whom, later, was given such a sombre physiognomy, as is the case, still later again, with his successor Serapis – was represented, on the most ancient monuments, with



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a horn of plenty in his hand. His name meant wealth. Very early on, it was believed, in opposition to what has been said by the moderns about the ‘jealousy of the gods’, that it pleased the divinity to distribute the wealth of which he disposed. This was believed of Venus above all. She was called par excellence the ‘giver’ (dwri=tij). In this way the idea of gentleness was first joined to the idea of this goddess. In Asia, and similarly in very ancient times in Greece, she was adored often in the form of a dove, a bird that was supposed not to have gall, and that one sees in Genesis, after the deluge, carry an olive branch as a sign of peace. Numerous ancient images of Venus, in Greece, represent her holding a dove in her hand. Moreover, in the other hand she often delicately lifts one of the folds of her tunic, as if to begin, with a gentle allure, some kind of dance. This is a symbolic expression of the gracious beauty that the Greek people, once again, attributed above all to its Venus. In the development of ancient mythology, beneficence, which from the beginning formed the basis of the character attributed to celestial Venus, appears more and more. The fruit in the hand of the goddess became, after the dove, the significant symbol of this; the fruit, in which is concentrated, so to speak, the idea of Elysian beatitude, to which she likes to admit souls. Then the thought arose, which must have been the last word of the principal Mysteries, that Elysian felicity is ultimately an intimate union, by conjugal association, with the divinity. The dead, at least the most illustrious among them, became in Egypt so many versions of Osiris, husband of the great goddess Isis. In the Greek and Roman beliefs, they became husbands of Proserpine, in this way equal to, if not identified with the sovereign of the underworld. The union of Venus with Mars was one of the classical types of these sacred unions, ieroi\ ga&moi. Originally, Mars must have represented one of the aspects of the sovereign of the infernal and divine regions. Both Pluto and Mars were given a helmet as a headdress. Perhaps they were thus made out to be the master and the man at arms of the divine fortress inhabited by the gods and souls. For the Latins, the name of Mars seemed to merge with that of Death, and for the Greeks the spirit of Death is often represented, in the earliest periods, in the figure of a warrior. In the most primitive times, when the opposing powers of which one saw everywhere the antagonism or the accord were merged in an indistinct unity, celestial Venus, mother of all things, was often made out to be androgynous, at the very least, to be a goddess of a half-virile nature, who was depicted, like Asia Minor’s Artemis, mastering wild beasts with her hands. But if, for the Greeks themselves of the most ancient periods, she often had weapons in hand, she was increasingly feminized, so to speak, and a husband for her was formed from the masculine principle that originally was hardly distinguished from the feminine in her. The couple of Mars and Venus appears on the nuptial chest of Cypselus. It appears on what is called the François vase. On the large triangular base at the Louvre, a monument of a still archaic Greek style that dates, not as has been claimed, from the Antonine period, but rather from the fifth or fourth century before Christ – and which, in any case, agrees, in terms

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of the subjects depicted, with the most ancient mythology – the twelve great gods are assembled in conjugal couples, one of which is composed of Mars and Venus.9 The god and the goddess are facing each other, the former completely armed, the latter with a dove in her left hand. In this couple, more than in any of the others, are presented the two contrary powers, whose action is the principle of all the oppositions and harmonies of the universe, the one being the cause of division, the other of union. Empedocles, in his philosophical poem, reduced nature as a whole to discord and friendship, and he called discord Ares (Mars) and friendship Aphrodite (Venus). Mythology and art did not always maintain themselves at the same height. The cult of celestial Venus was considered to have been inaugurated in Athens by Theseus. A place for her was ready in a city that honoured, above all other virtues, gentleness, and who had for a patron, together with Minerva, creator of the pacific olive tree, Apollo, who everywhere, by harmony, had to establish the reign of peace. Are not harmony and gentleness, as Leonardo da Vinci said, one and the same thing? And who other could inaugurate in Athens the cult of Venus Urania than the hero who, in founding democracy in the city, wanted, as was believed, friendship to reign there, the friendship whose classical model, after the mutual affection of Jupiter’s two brothers, Dioscures, was Theseus and Pirithous? A legislator still more favourable to the crowd than Theseus subsequently founded for it the cult of a Venus of an inferior order, the one called Pandemos or Venus for all the people. Whatever may have been the original signification of this sobriquet, on which there is no agreement, it cannot be doubted, from the manner in which both Plato and Xenophon speak of her, in opposing her to the goddess that inspired heroic friendships, that Venus Pandemos responded to less elevated ideas than the venerable, ancient Urania. Perhaps she presided over the meetings of the inferior class, who originally could not, in Athens as in Rome, have participated in the honour of religious consecration. Solon imposed on the courtesans the obligation to pay a tribute to Venus Pandemos; this could have been the price of a sort of tolerance for a trade that was practised at the expense of marriage, recommended by the institution of the cult of Venus Pandemos to all citizens. The courtesans, as Lucien relates, made sacrifices to Celestial Venus at the same time as to the Popular Venus. Later still, there were altars for a Venus of a third rank, to which the courtesans in particular made their sacrifices, and that herself bore the name of courtesan (po&rnh).10 From the Venuses of different orders there must have resulted in ordinary opinion a mixed and hybrid idea of the divinity they represented. It is one of the most remarkable traits of ancient mythology that each of the personalities between which the divine nature was distributed presented themselves to their public in several forms: Veneres Cupidinesque, says Catullus, who expresses in one word this peculiarity.11 From the different ideas that had been formed of Venus and from the accessories that had been joined to her, there came to be formed a sort of hybrid mythological



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personality, enjoying Romanesque adventures, that the periods of decadence, and subsequently modern centuries, were particularly familiar with. Venus became thus the wife of Vulcan, a former god in disgrace granted this compensation, and Mars was no more than the adulterous lover of the goddess. The Asiatic Astarte had for a husband a great god named Adonai, and that is to say, the Master: he became for the Greeks a hunter, Adonis, loved by Venus, then victim of the jealousy of Mars. Among these novelties, the invention of the judgement of Paris gave to the ancient symbol of happiness and goodness a frivolous sense. The fruit so often put in Venus’s hand was nothing more than a prize for beauty proposed by Discord so as to turn each of the principal goddesses against each other and, after the edict issued on Mount Ida, a matter of triumph for a puerile vanity. The primitive period in which the gods were situated in the mysterious depths, from which all life arose, was followed by another in which they moved to the surface of the earth and on to its highest summits, in the full light of day, leaving behind them in the lower regions only a few imitations of themselves. This is the revolution indicated by Aristotle with a few words in the passage of book XII of the Metaphysics, where, refuting an argument that the materialism of his time sought to draw from the testimony of the old poetry, he remarks that, if the latter seemed to make everything begin from Night, it still supposed at the heart of the original night the presence of an active cause of perfection and beauty. In this transformation, Venus Urania conserved neither her creative and governing power over all things, nor her subterranean empire. Probably, nevertheless, in a few places the memory remained of her former greatness. It must have been maintained, above all in Athens, jealous preserver of ancient traditions, into the fifth century, since Phidias, in this century, executed statues of the Celestial Venus for two temples situated in the two principal parts of the city. Whether the fruit that the Venus de Milo has in her hand was a part of these figures or not, it is to the deity of which they were representations that he returns us, just as she reveals by her style an art prior to the period in which the fable of the apple of discord was imagined; it is the Venus still held in such great honour in Phidias’s century that he reveals in the statue of Milo, and none of the goddesses of the same name that succeeded her. In a general way, to interpret the statue of Milo according to the shallow inventions of a decadent period was to apply to her a measure that she transcended, so to speak, by all the height that separates the religion and art of such a period from the religion and art of more elevated epochs. The apple in the hand of the Venus de Milo, whose style points back to a more ancient period than the one that invented the judgement of Paris, is evidently what the pomegranate was in Polycleitus’s Juno: a symbol designating divine felicity, together with peace, which in the thought and language of antiquity enveloped prosperity. This symbol, like the even older dove, forms a harmonic contrast thus with the weapons belonging to the companion of the goddess. Brought together

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in this way, the whole group expresses a singular thought: gentleness dominating violence by persuasion. This thought is what Lucretius still expresses in the first verse of his poem in which he depicts Mars subjugated by the love that he inspires in Venus, and that the author of a Latin inscription published by Gruter expressed in these words that he has the goddess speak: Martem sine marte subegi.12 According to Greek opinion, such as the poet-philosopher Empedocles expressed it with more force than anyone else, but which emanates from all of their civilization, there were two primordial elements of things that one could call the mild, e/9meron, and the rough, a)/rgion, and of which the second was to be subjected to the first. Hence a common subject of the mythological stories decorating temples was the struggle of the heroes against the Centaurs or the Amazons; a struggle that was reproduced, in history, by that of the Hellenes against the Barbarians. Other, no less significant expressions of the same idea were the Jupiter of Olympia, supreme god that all of Greece came to worship there, holding in his right hand a Victory, but crowned with an olive branch; Pallas having become the patron of Athens in creating the tree of peace; Bacchus, principal liberator, with a physiognomy full, like that of Jupiter, of amenity, and surrounded by wild beings that he had tamed; and finally the smile that graces the faces of divinities, and, above all, of Venus. The principle of gentleness and unity, triumphing over a contrary principle of harshness and discord, was the whole secret of the natural and social world. The group that presently occupies us, such as it is commented on, so to speak, by the numerous rediscovered imitations of it, were its figuration in art. * If the composition of which the Venus de Milo was a part can be described as I just have, are we reduced, as Quatremère de Quincy thought, to remaining entirely ignorant of what was, as for its form – plastically speaking as it were – the figure that was associated to her? On the contrary, if I am not mistaken, there exist elements sufficient to determine it with the greatest probability. There exist a certain number of monuments either of sculpture or of glyptic where with a Mars appears a Venus quite similar, at least for the ensemble and the principal details, to the statue of Milo. The principal ones are four groups in the round that are to be found in the Louvre, in the Capitoline Museums, in the Uffizi in Florence, and in the Villa Borghese; and also four bas-reliefs, of which two served to decorate sarcophagi, one of them belonging to the old Mattei collection, the other on display in Pisa’s Campo Santo, and two others recently exhumed from ruins of ancient cities: the first of these discovered two years ago by the Count of Langoroucki, in Side, Pamphylia, the second discovered since then in Locris, by Paolo Orsi; plus a medal of Faustina the Younger and two engraved stones of the museum of Florence; and



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to these monuments we have to add another group of sculptures in the round in the royal palace of Turin, where the Venus of Milo has become a Hygia grouped with an Asclepius. In eight of these twelve monuments, the figure associated to the goddess is similar, at least in its pose, to the statue in the Louvre, which came from the old Borghese collection, representing a warrior wearing a helmet, and which was once thought to be Achilles. We have to add to them, as having obviously belonged to similar statues, several heads of which the best conserved are in the museums of the Louvre, Dresden, Munich, and in the Campo Santo, as well as a perfectly conserved torso that passed from the Campana collection to the Louvre, and finally a statue from the Ince Blundell Hall collection in England, which differs from the supposed Achilles only by being more svelte. More than twenty extant repetitions, more or less complete, of the type represented by our statue can be counted; from which it can be deduced that there must have existed a famous and classic prototype. The oldest reproduction remaining of it, which is at the same time the best conserved, is the Ares Borghese. With this figure or with a similar figure a Venus of the same style, prototype of that of Milo, would probably have been grouped.13 In the prototype of the Venus de Milo, the legs would have been shorter; the waist, seen from the front, would have been even broader, the chest even more ample, with more distance between the breasts, the curve of the face more uniformly full, the eyes and mouth larger. For these are, compared to more recent works, characteristics of the sculptures remaining from the fifth century, for example the Caryatids of the Erechteion, and several of these characteristics are present in the Madrid statue. They can also be seen, to a point, in a Pentelic marble head, which thus almost certainly derives from Athens, that I found in one of the stores of the Louvre, and which, according to its general character, its proportions and the inclination of its neck, should be regarded as having belonged to a repetition of the type reproduced by the Venus de Milo. Unfortunately, this head had been prepared for a restoration, and in the barbarous manner that I discussed above. The preparation consisted in deeply cutting out its temple across the whole of its breadth, in making the nose, a part of the mouth and the ears disappear. But what remains of the marble seems to me sufficient to justify what I have just proposed. It would be possible, then, to carry out a restoration very close to the original group by employing the Ares Borghese and by associating to it a Venus of the same dimensions as that of Milo, similar in form and costume to the statue of the museum of Madrid and for which one could provide as a head, after the indispensable reparations, the one I have just mentioned. In truth, Friedrichs, whom others have followed (particularly Wolters, in his new edition of Friedrich’s Bausteine), believed that the Ares Borghese must have been a creation of the Roman epoch. But the reason he gave for this relates to the somewhat massive forms of the statue. Yet, on the contrary, in the epoch named Roman, as for

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the proportions, the rules of the last Greek schools were followed, schools which taught, according to Lysippus, that figures should be granted as much slenderness and elegance as possible. The Ares Borghese has relatively short legs, as well as large feet and very large and open eyes, traits proper to an epoch that can hardly be more recent that the beginning of the fifth century. The elaboration of the marble, on the other hand, far from offering the softness and roundness with which Roman statuary – in the century of the Antonii above all, as can be seen, for example, in so many different figures of Antinous – is executed, at least in the body and members, with the sharpness in which Pliny located an essential aspect of ancient Greek style. However, the way in which the hair, and the facial and bodily hair are treated indicate a slightly more recent period, from which it can be deduced that this statue is an imitation of an older work, in which a few modern traits are joined to the those of the original, but which still allows us to guess the approximate date of the original. If, now, coming back to the Venus itself, we examine attentively its style, a similar conclusion emerges. When the Venus de Milo appeared, it was generally attributed to Praxiteles. The reason for this rested on the similarity that was noticed and that Quatremère de Quincy emphasized between the head of this Venus and that of the Venus of Knidos. Clearly, the workmanship in the Venus of Milo cannot be traced back to a period before Praxiteles. But, from the resemblance of the head to that of the Venus of Knidos, it does not necessarily follow that it has to be attributed either to the author of the latter Venus, or to one of his disciples. It can also be attributed to a more recent time, in which the influence of the great sculptor, who carried to an hitherto unknown perfection the representation of feminine beauty, would still have made itself felt. And, indeed, several circumstances oppose the attribution of the statue of Milo to the time of Praxiteles himself. The eyes are markedly smaller than in the Venus of Knidos, and recall in this way the supposed Inopus of the Louvre, which I claimed, when I was nominated head of the Conservation of Antiquities, was an Alexander, a work of the school of Lysippus. It presents, moreover, something sinuous in the flesh and a freedom, if not even a wilful negligence in the hair, executed partially with a trepan, without any attempt to efface the traces of this instrument, which seemed to betray the school of Lysippus.14 It does not therefore seem necessary to trace this statue back beyond the century of Alexander. But, on the other hand, traces of a more ancient style than that even of Praxiteles are visible in it. These are the broadness of the chest and the largeness of the feet, present in the repetition of the same model, restored as a Lyre player, that can be seen in the Louvre, as well as in the Venus of Falerone, which also belongs to this museum. These traits point back to the fifth century. Finally, in these circumstances, the under-elaborated elements in the statue of Milo, and the fact that it was carved from two pieces of marble assembled together, which would not have been done with an original work, are the clues that this statue,



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despite its rare beauty, is merely the reproduction of a famous prototype. The Venus that was the prototype of that of Milo would have differed from it by her costume. In the fifth century, goddesses were not represented nude, or even half-dressed. The primitive Venus would have worn, in addition to the cloak enveloping the lower part of her body in the Venus de Milo and in all the reproduction or variants that we have of her, the tunic that was the principal item of Greek female costume. From this, it can be concluded that the Venus de Milo is a reproduction, though executed with great freedom, from the Hellenic period of a type created in Phidias’s century. This is a conclusion that has been confirmed, since I announced it, by a discovery made in the ruins of an ancient city of Greater Greece. Paolo Orsi, curator of the museum of Syracuse, who began and who has been directing now for three years, with two members of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, the dig in the ruins of Locris, has exhumed, among a number of terracotta figurines belonging almost wholly to an ancient period, a fragment of a bas-relief in the same material, representing a woman similar in her principal traits to the Venus de Milo, grouped together with a nude warrior, carrying a shield on his left arm, who also resembles the Ares Borghese. And it is not possible, in his opinion, as he wrote to me in announcing his discovery, to attribute to this piece another date than the period between 450 and 410 bc. It can be considered as infinitely probable that this terracotta is, like so many others, a reduction on a small scale of a famous sculptural monument. This monument must have been the original of the group whose reconstruction I have attempted. In removing the tunic, the author of the Venus de Milo modified the cloak in such a way as to make of it something of a garment of an intermediary nature. The tunic of Greek women was made of a thin material, with many folds; the cloak, of a thicker material, with fewer folds. In the Venus de Milo, the cloak is of an average thickness, and, while in all the other repetitions of the same type the cloak falls, from the knee, in a vertical mass, in the Venus de Milo it sticks to the leg and adopts its form. Consequently, the figure has perhaps less majesty and more of the elegant lightness that Lysippus promoted. The Venus of the Locris bas-relief is clothed, as well as with the cloak, a tunic. Moreover, the disposition of the tunic in the primitive Venus can be judged by the Venus in the Madrid museum, and by another that I discovered in what has been named the Courtyard of the Pigna in the Vatican. In both, the upper part of the tunic is held by a strap that, after having passed under the arms and above the shoulders so as to cross on the back, comes back to be tied under the breast, and a second strap surrounds the body at the level of the hips; the latter, often to be seen in ancient statues, served to raise the level of the tunic, depending on whether it was a matter of walking, dancing or running. The goddess of hunting, such as she is represented by the famous Louvre statue, which was formerly one of the principal ornaments

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of Fontainebleu, and then of Versailles, does not have different garments to those of Juno and the Muses. Only, her tunic is held up by a belt to a level just above the knees, and her cloak rolled up and worn around the shoulder. The upper cord was necessary to hold the tunic when this garment was without sleeves or with very large sleeves; it is rarely to be found on monuments from centuries later than the fifth, in which the fashion for narrow sleeves seems to have been generalized. And the statue of the Madrid museum recalls, as an ensemble, in many respects, the style of the fifth century. Once again, one can very probably judge from this statue, to which the one from the Vatican conforms, what the disposition of the garment was in the prototype of the Venus de Milo. An approximate idea of the group to which the Venus de Milo belonged can be gained if one puts it together with the Ares Borghese, having modified slightly the latter, particularly in the length of its legs, so as to bring it into harmony with the Venus. This is what I have attempted, and what is reproduced by the second of the plates presented at the end of this essay. In this attempt at an approximate restitution, I have substituted for the torso of the Ares Borghese that of the repetition of the same type from the Campana collection, and which is barely different, but which offers fewer traces of the archaic style. As authorized by many monuments of the same type, I have put a sword in his right hand, and a shield in his left. The peak of the helmet, which no longer exists in the Louvre statue, has been formed according to a variant of which I have seen a mould in Rome, a mould which is today in the Louvre. Whatever may be the imperfections of the restorations – which are not major, as will be noted – of the group necessary for it to serve the intention I propose, it will be recognized, easily I believe, that thus reconstituted its form justifies my hypothesis. Not only, indeed, do the two figures – for which, taken individually, no one has ever been able to provide a plausible interpretation – fit together and even at several points interlink when they are grouped in this way, but such is the concordance of their attitudes that they immediately appear designed to express one and the same thought. Looking at the way in which Venus turns towards the warrior at the same time as she poses softly on his shoulder, as a sign of affection, a hand in which she holds an attribute that is a tacit promise of felicity, one sees that she has just spoken tender words to him, to which she is waiting for a response. And his countenance indicates that, though with some hesitation, he is going to heed, or has already heeded the persuasive call of the goddess. He was passing, shield in his left hand, sword in his right, when Venus called him. We can even add that, walking and armed to join the combat, he must have been in a movement quite similar to the figure so well known by the name of Fighting Mars, that is to say, the body leaning forward, supported by the right leg, the left leg, as well as the right arm, held back, with the shield pushed forward: in a word, in the most fitting attitude to strike with force while protecting



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himself. Stopped in his tracks, he has brought back the weight of his body onto his left leg, which now is the support; the left arm retracted, he lets his right arm fall beside his body, and his head, turned towards the goddess, is inclined, as is his countenance, in expressing thus a moment of reflection and incertitude. The composition forms therefore an ensemble whose respective parts respond to each other so well that it cannot – whatever an excellent archaeologist may have said about it15 – be a pure effect of chance. Chance does not produce such miracles. It should be added that the group presents an aesthetic harmony as well as a physical and moral harmony. This results from both the concert of the two most excellent forms of beauty, the virile and the feminine, which complete each other, and – better still, if possible – from the happy concordance of the attitudes and expressions. In everything that remains from antiquity, it will be hard to find a group of a superior or even equal beauty. * Having reached this point, another question arises. If in the group Venus’s companion is the god Mars, her husband, how is it that the goddess occupies the principal place? The principal place was always the right. In all the ancient monuments in which gods and goddesses are assembled in conjugal couples, in the monuments of high Classical times above all, the husband is on the right, the wife on the left. One example of this is the large candelabra base in the Louvre, in which the twelve principal gods are arranged in couples, and we should add that the same principle is followed in the conjugal couples of the archaic period adorning Spartan funerary stelae, as it is in those found in Egypt. Though there exist Greek and Roman monuments in which a different arrangement is to be found, it will be seen, under attentive examination, that they are compositions imitating the group, which had evidently become classic, occupying us now, and whose aesthetic authority, so to speak, prevailed among artists, in more decadent times, over that of religious and civil ritual. All this accepted, it does not seem possible to admit that, in our group, the warrior placed to the left of Venus is Mars. Is it that in our group Mars is the lover of the goddess, and not her husband, and that this explains why he is not occupying the principal place? But, as we have seen, the legend of the adulterous adventures of Venus and Mars is of recent invention, born from the corruption of ancient mythology. No trace of it is to be found in the monuments going back to periods as old as that of the Venus de Milo, and to the period of the supposed Borghese Achilles. In such periods, when Mars and Venus were brought together on a monument, this was to present them as a conjugal couple, like Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Amphitrite, and in every couple of this type, once again, the husband occupies the right. Secondly, either in the group in which the Venus de Milo appeared, or in the original group, the Venus and her companion must have been of the same size.

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In comparing all the extant fragments from repetitions of this type, it is clear that the warrior was, in the original, of the same size as the Ares Borghese; the dimensions are generally identical. In the Ince Blundell Hall statue, the foot is much smaller, but this is because the proportions have been modified according to Lysippus’s rules; but the total height is just about the same, and that is to say slightly more than two metres. The Venus, on the other hand, must have been, in most of the reproductions, and, consequently, in the original model, the same height as the Venus de Milo. This also results from comparing the greatest number of extant fragments from reproductions of this figure. And this height was the same as that of the warrior. But this should not have been the case if Venus’s companion had been like her a god; in this case, he should have been larger, the male figure always being, among the mortals as well as among the immortals, of a greater size than the female. Given that, in our group, the warrior does not surpass the goddess in height, we have to conclude that the artist wanted him to be merely a hero. Mars, moreover, is always represented in a wholly virile age, not without a slightly harsh appearance. How to recognize this in the young man, whose hair is long and softly falls out from under his helmet onto his neck, in this young man still almost without a beard, whose sideburns are only beginning to form? Above all, how to take him for this god when he has such an indulgent air? Instead of the god of war, all of these circumstances betray rather a young hero, and one of those whose gentleness was an essential character. Let us add again that, as it would seem, the group was of an Athenian origin. The marble of the Venus de Milo is from Paros, and could have been executed far from the region where the model was created. But the Ares Borghese, which points to a period hardly distant from that in which its prototype had been created, is Pentelic marble, a material from which all the great works of sculpture of fifth-century Athens were made, and which was used elsewhere only rarely. Probably, therefore, the Ares Borghese represents a warrior dear to Athens. The disposition of the hair, the form and the ornamentation of the helmet of this warrior can be found in busts that one has thought to be of Miltiades and Themistocles, but which are certainly of Athenian generals, and in which the style clearly denotes the style of Phidias or one of his closest successors. Now, of all the heroes, the one that Athens honoured the most with great Heracles, was that to whom it traced its origin, namely Theseus. Thus it cannot be doubted that in Athens, and in its colonies, numerous images of Theseus would have been made, and there must be many in the museums that have not yet been recognized for what they are. I limit myself here to mentioning a few examples from the Louvre. It has a head in Pentelic marble – of beautiful style, recalling the fifth-century, with a lion skin as headdress, and which has been named Omphale. But the supposed Omphale has short hair straightened on the forehead,



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of a Herculean character, which are evidently that of a young man, and it can be considered to be very probable that this head is the remains of a statue of Theseus. The same applies to the head, also in Pentelic marble, so well known by the name Young Hercules. What is more, the latter, differing from the Ares Borghese in that his hair is short and straight like that of the supposed Omphale, presents both the same inclining movement on the right shoulder, and the same air of gentleness as the warrior. Everything in it, moreover, is of a similar style (the mouth in particular), and consequently it seems probable to me that it derives from a more or less similar statue from the same period, a variant of the same type. There exists a great number of pieces of sculpture that can be understood without difficulty as repetitions of the Ares Borghese. Two of the most important ones present particularities proper to Theseus: these are the torso of which I spoke above, which has been moved with a part of the Campana collection to the Louvre, and a statue belonging to the Ince Blundell Hall collection, in England, that I have also already mentioned. Theseus was often assimilated to Hercules; he was, in essence, an Athenian Hercules of a more elegant nature than the Boeotian hero, but with the attributes of the latter: with lion skin and club as defensive and offensive weapons. The torso in the Louvre rests on a tree trunk, like the Ares Borghese, but a lion skin lies on this tree trunk; moreover, on the shoulders are visible the two ends of a band that, clearly, hung from a crown on the head, the corona tortilis, surrounded by a band, that Hercules often wears. The torso – not possessing the massive forms almost always attributed to the son of Alcmene – can only be that of a Theseus to which the artist had given Herculean attributes. The figure represented by the Ince Blundell Hall statue is helmeted and at the same time carries a club, and thus can only be, as has always been supposed, a Theseus. But it conforms entirely, excepting the different proportions that point to a more recent period, to the Ares Borghese. From the comparison of these two pieces with the Ares Borghese we have the authority to deduce that the latter is a Theseus. A second reason for seeing a Theseus in the Ares Borghese is his air of gentleness. If the Greeks in general, as I have already said above in presenting how they conceived their Celestial Venus, took two opposing principles – the one of savage rudeness, the other of gentleness and peace – to explain everything by their contrariety and final accord; if, relating the first to barbarism, the second to Hellenism, they decorated the friezes of all their temples with compositions in which the struggle of the two principles was embodied by that of Greek heroes against Centaurs or Amazons, this idea was the favourite idea of Athens above all; and it had to personify the indulgence that it aimed to represent better than any other city in the hero whose primordial laws she thought she grasped. Theseus was taken to have been kind to the humble. He had given to Athens its democratic constitution. De Witte found an allusion to this in the short tunic

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without sleeves worn by the hero on two ancient painted vases of an ancient period, the one belonging to the Louvre, the other to the Department of Antiquities at the Bibliothèque Nationale – a tunic which, indeed, was the special garment of workers and slaves; and the same can be said of the hat worn by Theseus on a bas-relief in the Museum, where he is in the presence of supplicants adoring him. This hat is the one named by the Romas pileus, and which was the headdress of slaves and workers. In uniting – to form the Athenian city – quite separate communities, who must have hated and oppressed each other in the past, Theseus erected in the middle of the new community an altar to Mercy, where an asylum was always open to the unfortunate, and particularly to the most unfortunate of all, namely fugitives and the banished. In Oedipus at Colonus, he welcomes with a hospitable goodness the unfortunate son of Laius, rejected everywhere. Nothing therefore could better suit a statue of Theseus than an air of gentleness and goodness. Finally, on the Borghese statue, a singular attribute, that it is natural to relate to the same ideas, seems to provide a third argument, a decisive one, in favour of the conjecture according to which this statue represents the founder and patron of Athens. This is a ring encircling the bottom of his right leg, and which seems to be interpretable only in relation to one of the principal adventures of the hero – to, better, the most characteristic of all his adventures. The ring of the Ares Borghese has been explained, when this warrior was thought to be an Achilles, as a device to protect the only vulnerable part of his body, the heel. But it is too high to serve this purpose. I proposed that it was a belt serving to protect the edges of the malleolus against the edges of the greaves resting on them. But this explanation was not any more satisfactory. There is no apparent reason why the sculptor would have put such a device on one leg only, nor why it is not to be seen on any other statue; and finally the ring is still too high to protect the malleoli. Looking closely, there is here nothing other than a ring to which a chain was attached, such as would have been placed on a prisoner to prevent him from escaping. Mars was taken prisoner by the Giants; if, according to a quite probable supposition, the Ares Borghese were a Mars, the ring around his leg could be taken to allude to this adventure. But, for the reasons that I have presented, the Ares Borghese is not a Mars, but much rather a Theseus, and the strongest proof for this is, in the end, the ring, for which his history provides the reason why he has it, and which could not be more fitting in any other moment than in the one represented by the group occupying us now. Theseus had been a captive, and it was one of the most particular traits of his history. Having left for the island of Crete with the young men that Athens would leave as prey every year to the Minotaur, he was enclosed with them in the Labyrinth, the monster’s dwelling. But the Labyrinth, with its detours in which aspirant escapees became inextricably lost, was one of those hiding places where it was common, throughout antiquity, to hold captives chained to the wall. Nothing



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more natural, then, to recall in a statue of Theseus, representing him in his full glory, and to bring out all the more his present glorification, his former humiliation. The two painted vases, which I have just mentioned in relation to Theseus’s costume, represent him as glorified, and, on both, he has on his right leg a ring to which that of the statue is equivalent. In accordance with a predominant view in archaeology, and according to which a whole host of compositions in which two figures give each other their hands are farewell scenes, and which I have attempted to show that they show rather scenes of reunion, de Luynes and de Witte have interpreted the paintings on the two vases, an amphora from the Department of Antiques, and a cup from the Louvre, as representing the adieux of Theseus to Neptune and Amphitrite, his parents according to an accredited legend. But, if I am not mistaken, they represent in reality the return of the hero to his parents in their divine domain. On the amphora in the Department of Antiques, Neptune, sitting on a throne, holds his hand out to his son standing before him. Behind the god, a woman holds a crown. This crown quite probably is supposed to express the idea of the glorious crowning of the hero’s career. It will be less easy to explain according to the hypothesis of a departure, and it is more natural to see recompense rather than a promise in it. The cup from the Louvre is of a considerable size. Cups of this sort, left in tombs, seem to have been destined to express an idea of apotheosis. Hercules, when he is received in Olympia, often holds a large cup filled by a goddess. The cup in question here is decorated, on the outside, by a succession of small tableaux representing Theseus’s principal exploits, and, on the inside, by a single tableau in which the figures are of greater dimensions, and which features the hero, his mother and Minerva. The difference in dimensions is itself a clue that this latter scene takes place in a world superior to that in which the others take place. And, indeed, a sitting Amphitrite holds out her hand to her son standing before her, just as in the compositions that I have just invoked the blessed, in the eternal domain, take the hand of family members who have just joined them. With Theseus is Minerva, who assists the heroes in their struggles; fish are swimming about here and there, indicating that the meeting is taking place in the kingdom of the seas, and a triton has come, prosternating himself at Theseus’s feet, to support on the palms of upturned hands the soles of his feet, as if to honour in him his lord and master. Assuredly, the most natural explanation of the whole monument is that it is dedicated to celebrating Theseus’s reception, at the end of his career, into the maternal empire. But, on the two vases, the hero has a ring on the bottom of his right leg. Several monuments can serve both to distinguish the device serving to protect the malleoli against the greaves from the ring of captivity, and to confirm the interpretation that I am proposing for the presence, on the Ares Borghese, of this ring. At the bottom of a leg that belonged to one of the warriors that decorated the pediments of the great temple of Aegina, a leg that has recently been published with several other

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fragments, a cord is wrapped around it twice; this is clearly the device that protected the malleoli. On a vase belonging to the Lemberg collection, Achilles is in pursuit of Lycaon; on both of Achilles’ legs we see the same cord as the one around the leg on the pediment of Aegina, and around the right leg of the son of Priam a ring similar to the one, in the Bibliothèque Nationale amphora and the Louvre cup, on Theseus’s right leg. That this ring is a sign of slavery is what can no longer be doubted if it is recalled that Lycaon had been a slave, and that there is another hero on whose leg, on painted vases, the same ring is to be found, namely Peleus, and that Peleus had for a time been the prisoner of the Centaurs. The symbol that Venus holds in our group therefore corresponds perfectly with the one that characterizes the hero, the first signifying merit, the second recompense. And, by the contrast of the two symbols, it can easily be explained why the artist, in a composition supposed to be a visual panegyric for Theseus, gave the latter, when he is responding to the words addressed to him by the goddess, a dreamy air that seems to signify irresolution. By this dreamy air, combined with the presence of the sign of his former spontaneous devotion, the attempt was made to add to his character another trait that makes him all the more worthy of a lofty destiny. If Theseus was a slave, it is because he wanted to be one, and if he wanted to be one, it was to liberate, whatever the risks and perils, prisoners whose fate he shared. To depict on the statue and in the paintings the sign of his captivity was to recall, therefore, as well as his passion, the virtue that led him to have to endure it. It is by the generosity that was the great merit of the hero, indicated by the accessory he bears, just as the fruit in the hand of Venus recalls her divine gentleness, that, in the end, even his dreamy and indecisive air can be explained. How is it that he seems to hesitate to respond to the call of the goddess? There is something here recalling the famous allegory in which Prodicus had represented Hercules between two paths, of which the one, smooth and in flower, was that of Voluptuousness, and the other, harsh and troublesome, that of Virtue. Here, to the call of Venus herself, the hero seems to doubt whether he should put down his arms needed by infortune and weakness. In his magnanimous heart, the mercy to which he has consecrated his life and devoted his city struggles against love. Between the thought expressed by Prodicus’s fiction and that depicted by the group of Celestial Venus and Theseus, there is, however, a difference. In Prodicus’s fiction, Voluptuousness is in dispute with Virtue over Hercules. In the Athenian group, it is the goddess of celestial felicity who comes to reward heroic virtue with eternal peace. And, at bottom, what she rewards is her own work. Theseus, at the moment of leaving for Crete, made a sacrifice to Venus; he also made a sacrifice to her in returning from there. This is to say that this Mercy whose cult he instituted, as he did with Venus Urania, and who had inspired his enterprise of deliverance, and this divinity, spirit of beneficence and love, who made the hero descend into the Labyrinth, were one and the same thing. Raising him up next to her, at the close



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of his career, to divine dignity and felicity, was, following a formula of Christian theology, to reward her own gifts. If, indeed, after having made these observations, we turn back from the hero to the goddess, we see that in addition to grace, which was in all periods the characteristic attribute of Venus, she has a majesty befitting her, if we see in her, as did high antiquity, a sovereign obeyed by the whole world. This majesty entered so well into the idea that the Orient had formed of its Queen of the heavens, that the Romans, encountering in Carthage the goddess that the Tyrians had brought there and who was the patron of the city, goddess who could have been none other than the Phoenician Astarte, found in her their Juno. The same quality present in the Venus de Milo – which the Venus that was the prototype of the Venus de Milo would also have presented to a great degree – has been taken in our century, in which we do not sufficiently recall the original Venus, for arrogance. Better informed about the character of Celestial Venus, in which were united – just as in Jupiter, at least as Homer and Phidias understood him – majesty and gentleness, we ought to recognize that this alliance is formed in the highest degree in the statue of Melos, which shows an image of the ancient Urania, and Urania in the moment above all when, having the same role as Proserpine occupied in particular, as a sovereign she welcomed a mortal to whom she confers by this act divine dignity. It was, as we have seen, Theseus who introduced to Athens, after Erechtheus, the founder, the cult of Celestial Venus. He wanted, perhaps, to bear witness to his gratitude towards the goddess who had made seas favourable for his voyage to the island of Crete and who had also inspired in a girl from Minos the love by which she was led to provide the means for the hero to escape from the Labyrinth. Theseus, indeed, on his return, as I have just recalled, offered a sacrifice to Venus. But above all, in erecting a temple to Celestial Venus, his purpose must have been to recommend to his dear city, which must have been gentle above all others, the deity whose eminent character was gentleness. Whatever the case may be, the Venus placed in the temple that Theseus had built was called by the name of ‘fiancée’, nu/mfh, and the most probable explanation of this epithet seems to be that in this temple, apparently in accordance with the ideas of its founder, there took place special worship of the goddess who, moreover, presided over conjugal union as the sacred wife, promised, in a future life, to the heroes. Nothing, consequently, more natural than representing her in a monument of art as being, in the other world, a fiancée of Theseus himself. And different circumstances seem to indicate that the Venus de Milo is depicted in this role, as would have been the antique statue whose essential traits she reproduced. Behind the Venus de Milo, in the base there is a slight depression to which a section of her drapery falls. This is a detail that the restoration workshop at the Museum, as we have seen, had made disappear. At the edge of this cavity can also be seen the sketch of a tree trunk serving as a support for the statue, but which could

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also serve to indicate that there was water favouring vegetation in the cavity. The Elysian region was imagined as an earth where abundant waters flowed, bordered by the sorts of trees to which humidity is most favourable. In the Odyssey, Ulysses, arriving in the realm of Proserpine, immediately finds poplars and willows. On another side, Venus poses her left foot on an elevation of the terrain. This attitude is, as several archaeologists have remarked, a typical sign of domination. But one can also think that this elevation of the earth indicates, as if by a sort of conventional abbreviation, a height. Elysium was a country of mountains as well as plains, and above all, perhaps, mountains that were believed to be particularly sacred. Orion in the Odyssey hunts in the underworld, and, perhaps, among hills covered with forests, where the wild animals lived. On a number of painted vases, the blessed, served by satyrs and nymphs, are sitting on rocks piled on top of each other that seem to represent elevated places. The drapery that forms the whole clothing of the Venus de Milo hangs down in one section, as we have just seen, into the cavity situated behind the goddess. Is this not a sign that Venus emerges from it, and, probably, after having bathed in water contained by it? The disorder of her hair, of which a few rings drop onto her neck (and the same goes for the variant in the Courtyard of the Pigna) suggests the idea that she is emerging from her bath. She comes out of it, and, wanting to stop Theseus who is passing by, she has only been able, instead of putting her cloak back on her shoulders, to throw it around her. From these different circumstances, it seems that we are authorized to conclude, bathing being a sacramental preliminary to marriage, that the whole composition of the Venus de Milo had the objective of representing the goddess in the role of a divine fiancée on the eve of an Elysian wedding. This wedding, it is she herself who proposes it to a hero, her inferior, but whom she has made worthy by her inspiration to reign with her. This is the expressive image of a divine grace seeking out humanity in order to unify itself with it; a conception that was not foreign to Judaism, in which Jehovah goes to the front of the chosen people to bring them closer to him, and that the Christian religion was to carry, after paganism and Judaism, to a new height. * It remains to determine, if it is possible to do so, to whom or to which school the composition, one of whose variants was the group to which the Venus de Milo belonged, should be attributed, and also to determine where it was placed, and for what purpose, and then how it happened that such a remarkable reproduction of it was found on one of the islands of the Greek archipelago. From the great number of repetitions and variants that were executed of the prototype reproduced by the Venus de Milo, it can be deduced that its model was renowned, and, as we have seen, it cannot be traced to a period less ancient than



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the beginning of the fifth century. Now, three authors, Pliny, Pausanias, Lucien, all mention a celebrated Venus from this century, a work of Alcamenes and Phidias, that was admired in Athens in an area called the Gardens, and thus that was commonly called the Venus of the Gardens: this is the prototype to which the Venus de Milo has to be traced back. One will object to this conclusion first of all, perhaps, that in speaking of the Venus of the Gardens, Pliny, Pausanias, Lucien say nothing of a second figure. This monument, it will be possible to say, cannot be a group. But the objection is not insurmountable. In Raphael’s paintings named The Virgin with the Chair, Virgin with the Cradle etc., the Virgin is accompanied by several other figures. Pliny himself designates by the name of Laocoon a group in which this priest of Apollo was accompanied by his two sons. Why, then, would the name Venus of the Gardens not have been applied to a group of which Venus was the principal figure? Another objection could be opposed to the identification of the Venus de Milo’s prototype with the Venus of the Gardens: on the one hand, Pliny speaks of a Venus by Phidias different to that of the Gardens, one installed in Rome’s Portico of Octavia, as also being of a rare beauty, and that, on the other hand, there exist reproductions, attesting to a famous original by the sheer fact of their number, of a Venus which, different to that of Milo, also bears the mark of the school of Phidias. I mean the figure clothed in a tunic without sleeves and without belt, who with the right hand draws back her cloak onto her shoulders, while she holds out in her left hand a fruit, and which is named the Venus Genetrix, because this denomination accompanies an image of it on the back of a medallion, one struck in the honour of the empress Sabine, who is doubtless represented in the figure of the goddess. The Venus de Milo grouped with a Mars also can be found on an imperial medallion, this one struck in the honour of the empress Faustina the Younger, who doubtless figures in it as Venus, just as her husband, Marcus Aurelius, appears as Mars. It has been supposed, with some likelihood, that this medal was composed to commemorate a situation in which the empress had obtained from her husband that he renounce a war begun or projected. However, it could also be that it served simply to represent Faustina in the guise of Venus conceived, as the Queen of the heavens, as the power which makes peace prevail over violence. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that the Romans had, in two circumstances, reproduced on two imperial medals two different statues of Venus, of which one was similar to the Venus de Milo, the other to the Venus Genetrix, and which also belonged to the school of Phidias. Now, what was the prototype of this latter statue? Bernoulli, in his Aphrodite, has thought it likely that this prototype was the statue that Julius Caesar had the sculptor Arcesilaus make for the temple that he had built for Venus, as the mother of Iule, author of his race, in granting to the goddess the sobriquet Genetrix. At the same time, he thought Arcesilaus must have imitated some classical model from a previous epoch. What was this model?

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Otfried Müller had signalled in the forms of the Venus Genetrix vestiges of fifthcentury style. Bernoulli, on the contrary, sees in the powerful aspect of these forms a mark of Roman taste; and, consequently, although he did not come to a definite opinion, he seems to be inclined to think that the Venus Genetrix, such as we know it, represented Praxiteles’ draped Venus, accommodated by Arcesilaus to Roman taste. But we can only repeat, concerning the Venus Genetrix, the observation made concerning the Ares Borghese. The slightly concentrated forms are in no way proper to the style that can be called Roman; they are proper, on the contrary, as Müller saw, to ancient Greek style. If, therefore, they are to be found in the Venus Genetrix, this is a proof that the model for it was, like that of the Ares Borghese, a work of the fifth century, and even of the beginning of this century, and that it is to the time of Phidias that we have to trace its origins. And, indeed, the Venus Genetrix has a notable similarity to two works of Phidias or his school, of which the first is one of the goddesses of the frieze of the Parthenon cella, and the second is the woman that Mercury holds by the hand in the famous bas-relief which was thought, erroneously, to be Eurydice between Mercury and Orpheus, and where the way in which above all the hair is treated, on the god, by regular rings, and on the woman, by waves forming parallel zigzags, points to the beginning rather than the end or even the middle of the fifth century. Thus Arcesilaus, in order to form his Venus Genetrix, would have selected a model from the same epoch as the prototype of the Venus de Milo, and having been produced by the same school, which it was agreed had rendered better than any other the majesty of the gods. To the idea of assigning the Venus Genetrix to the school of Phidias, one could oppose, rather than its proportions, the circumstance that this Venus is in movement, and, consequently, carries her weight on one foot only, and that, according to the testimony of Pliny, the first sculptor to execute such figures was Polycleitus, who, although he was a contemporary of Phidias, seems, as Pliny’s text suggests, to have worked or at least to have become famous only slightly after him. But Pliny’s assertion probably applies only to the male statues, which were the most famous works of Polycleitus, the Diadumenos or the Doryphoros. For, not only do the Caryatids of the temple of Erechtheion, which clearly belong to the school of Phidias, carry their weight on one foot, but the same applies to the Parthenon Minerva. The reduced copy of it found a few years ago is evidence for this. Now, could it not be the case that it is in the prototype of the Venus Genetrix, rather than in that of the Venus de Milo, that one has to search for Alcamenes’ and Phidias’s Venus of the Gardens? This hypothesis does not seem admissible. On the two medals of Sabina and Faustina, the Venuses are, according to all probability, as we have said, reproductions of two statues by Phidias. And, precisely,



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beyond the Venus Urania of Elis, two other Venus Urania were celebrated: one was the Venus in the Gardens, the other was seen in Rome, in Pliny’s time, in the Portico of Octavia. It would seem, then, that these two statues are reproduced on the imperial medals with the denominations Venus Mother and Venus Victorious. It remains to see if it is possible to determine from which of the two statues each of the medals derives. Of Phidias’s Venuses, the one of the Gardens was the most beautiful. For, if Pliny says that the one of the Portico of Octavia was of a rare beauty, Pliny himself, as well as Lucien and Pausanias, say that it counts among the monuments of Athens, where there were so many remarkable ones, as worthy of being contemplated: qe/aj a)ci/a. But, on the other hand, though there exist many reproductions of the Venus Genetrix, there are many more, with all sorts of variations, of the Venus de Milo. The latter was therefore the more famous of the two: consequently, it is more natural to identify it with the Venus of the Gardens, and it is to the Venus of the Portico of Octavia that the Genetrix is related. Arcesilaus, moreover, could not choose, in order to represent the Venus as mother of Iule, a statue in which the goddess was joined either to Theseus or to Mars. In the end, it is likely that the Venus Genetrix had been created by its author specifically to represent the spirit of fecundity in the form of the goddess. The large veil or cloak that she carries on her shoulders belonged specially to married women; ordinarily young girls wore, with the tunic, only the small peplus that one can see on those of the frieze of the Parthenon. On the other hand, the Venus Genetrix has no belt and is walking. The significance attached to the undoing of the belt by the ancients is well known. Finally, the gesture by which the Venus Genetrix shows a fruit that she is holding in her left hand and the one she makes with her right hand, to envelop herself in her veil, seem to be, thus combined, a sufficiently clear indication, despite the reserve proper to Greek art, of the idea of maternity. There is thus room to suppose that if the Venus de Milo is represented as a fiancée, the Genetrix is represented as a wife exiting the nuptial chamber. Consequently, it was natural that Arcesilaus, given by Caesar the task of executing a Venus in which was to be honoured the mother of the race of Aeneas (AEneadum genetrix), took for a model, among so many other famous statues of the goddess, Phidias’s Venus Genetrix. Secondly, though we have little information on what distinguished, between so many Venuses, that of the Gardens, the information that we do have suffices to show that what was held to be most remarkable in it must have characterized the prototype of the Venus de Milo rather than that of the Venus Genetrix. Admired in it above all – as Lucien, who had been a sculptor, said – was what was before the eyes.16 The expression seemed particularly suited to a figure who did not wholly show herself, and consequently to what must have been the prototype of the Venus de Milo, which was made, as I hope to have demonstrated, to be viewed from one side only. The details of it that were admired the most were the cheeks and

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the hands, the latter ‘ending in fine extremities’. Now, there are two heads that we have reason to consider as having belonged to examples of the Venus Genetrix, and this because of their general conformity to the heads of the terracotta reductions of the statue found in Myrina and elsewhere, and also because of their style. These two heads are the one adapted – in an intelligent, this time, work of restoration – to the example from the Louvre, and another quite similar one from the museum of Grenoble. And, in both, the cheeks, far from being of an exceptional beauty, have accentuated planes that recall the hardness of the archaic style. As for the hands, the right being raised so as to turn back and grasp the cloak, its fingers are barely visible, and in the left, holding an apple, moving forward with the fingers slightly withdrawn around it, the fingers are seen only in an abbreviated form, in such a way that there was no particular reason to celebrate specially their perfection. On the contrary, in the type presented by the Venus de Milo, viewed, as it should be, in profile from the right, if one of the cheeks is not in view, the other is shown to the spectator in all its development, and the smile that makes it become slightly rounded gives it all the beauty of form of which this part of the face is capable. Finally, if the left hand, as a whole, was hardly in view, the fingers nevertheless advanced from it in such a way that it is possible to appreciate their forms, at least at their extremities; the right hand, which moves towards the goddess’s companion, is shown, like the cheek, in its full development, without any abbreviation, and it becomes clear that the artist put all his care and talent into it. Lucien’s remarks do not seem therefore applicable to the Venus Genetrix, and rather only to the original of the Venus de Milo. And an at least probable argument can be drawn from this for the identification of the Venus de Milo with the Venus of the Gardens. Yet another circumstance can be invoked in favour of this identification: the site where the Venus of the Gardens was placed. The Gardens was an area of the eastern part of Athens, watered by the Ilyssus. Nothing was more natural than to place in the middle of the gardens a temple of the goddess who presided over flowering, and who was often depicted crowned with roses or violets. But if there had to be only one place for the residence and the image of a Celestial Venus, represented as receiving beside her a hero so as to make of him a god, then this was in gardens in which, or next to which, there were both monuments of the heroes and schools founded to educate the youth so that they should arrive, by the same path, at the same goal. Such were the Gardens in which the Celestial Venus of Alcamenes and Phidias was placed. On the banks of the Ilyssus there were tombs: in the riverbed was found one of the most beautiful and largest funerary stelae ever known, which I published, in 1875, in the Revue archéologique. And, not far from there, was the great school of the Lyceum. From the Lyceum, the young people that were educated there must have often come down to the banks of the Ilyssus, which flowed more fully then than now, in



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order to bathe, like the young Romans in the Tiber, and to rest there in the shadows, among the monuments which reminded them of the virtues of their ancestors. What could be more natural than raising in such a place, in the middle of the gardens which covered it, the sanctuary of the great goddess by whom the souls that she inspired were welcomed? There is no other site, consequently, where the group that Phidias conceived and completed would have been better placed. The region watered by the Ilyssus was, according to Thucydides, the oldest part of the city. Hence the temples of the principal gods were located there. From the time of Cimon, the western side of Athens was developed greatly. It was necessary to have temples of the greatest gods there too. The part of the area called Keramikos, situated outside of the walls, included, along the course of the Cephissus, large gardens. Tombs of the principal citizens who had fallen in the Medic Wars were placed there, and immediately afterwards was founded the great gymnasium named the Academy. And in the same region, at a short distance, was raised, as a counterpart to the temple of Celestial Venus on the banks of the Ilyssus, a second temple to the same goddess, with a statue that was also executed by Phidias. It is not unreasonable to conjecture that this statue reproduced, though perhaps in a new form, the same idea as Alcamenes’ and Phidias’s group. It is also not unreasonable to conjecture – since Pausanias contents himself with invoking it with a single word, in a way that indicates that he had not seen it – that it was the one that had been transported to Rome, and which Arcesilaus could adopt as a model for the figure to be made, on Caesar’s command, in the temple of mother Venus. Since it was, in sum, the Venus of the Gardens who, of the different images that Phidias had made of the goddess, presented the most perfection, there is reason to believe that it was the one displaying in the highest degree the quality surpassing all others, and which seems to be the one whose art Phidias was the first to master. From Lucien’s two remarks on the beauty of the cheeks and the fineness of the fingers in the Venus of the Gardens, it can be deduced that in this master-work, where everything would have been in perfect harmony with the principal parts, which are always the head and the hands, Phidias must have united to the nobility characterizing all of his works a great degree of grace. Greek artists always sought grace, and this is what distinguished them first of all from the regions surrounding Greece.17 But for a long time they were able to express it, in their gods of human form, only by the smile, the sign of kindliness and beatitude that, in archaic monuments, governs the physiognomies of their gods and heroes,18 and by certain gestures that are more symbolic than imitative: such is, in their early Venuses, the movement by which they lift up delicately a fold at the front of their drapery, as if to begin a dance; and such is the gait of so many gods of ancient times which, moving forward on tip-toe, seem to slip lightly on earth rather than rest on it. The attitudes, moreover, remain uniform and rigid for a long time.

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One of Phidias’s contemporaries, but who seems to have started before him, Myron, was the first to break with the archaic rigidity. Understanding better than his predecessors the independence that the parts, in a living whole, possess in relation to each other, and particularly of the superior in relation to the inferior parts, an independence whose idea could be partially suggested by that of the diverse members of a free city, such as were the Hellenic cities, Myron was able to discover the secret of the flexion and torsions, similar to the turns and tropes of poetic phrasing, without which grace is impossible. Whence the expertly twisted and elaborated figures, as Quintilian puts it,19 like the Discobolus, to which in this respect one can relate the Boy with Thorn. Phidias, then, harmonizing these movements with the beauty by which his noble spirit was taken, was the first to arrive at perfect grace. Why, if not, perhaps, because he was the first to know, as a faithful interpreter of the Athenian spirit, where grace has its source? He had represented on one of the pediments of the Parthenon the warrior Minerva, becoming the patron of Attica by the gift that she offers to it of the pacific olive branch. He had crowned with this same olive branch the head of his Jupiter of Olympia, indicating thus the goal of the Victory of which the god held a symbol in his hand. On Jupiter’s throne, he had represented, between other subjects, the birth of Venus; and he had represented it by Love pulling the goddess from the waves. This was – instead of remaining with vulgar mythology, according to which love was born from beauty – to say in the figurative language of poetry that the supreme beauty, personified by Venus, owed its origin to love, an idea to which this phrase of a modern thinker (Schelling) returns: ‘The most beautiful things are those in which it seems that everything loves.’ Venus, in Virgil, says to Eros: ‘It is you who give me all my power’. And what mythological figure should the great artist cover in grace other than that of a Celestial Venus offered to the city that took as its ideal of civilization gentleness, and, in this city itself, to the area, doubtless considered as a privileged site of peace and delights called the Gardens? That the Venus of the Gardens must have had grace as an eminent quality is another reason, and an important one, to relate the Venus de Milo to it, as a repetition to its prototype. Restored as it should be, the Venus de Milo is a model of grace and at the same time of dignity; and she draws her grace from the movement by which she descends, so to speak, from the height of her sovereignty to share her empire with a hero. The Venus of the Gardens was the work of two artists, of which the first had perhaps employed a style still influenced by archaic rigidity, and the second a style in which there lacked almost nothing of the suppleness of nature. According to what we have seen above, it is to this that the group of Celestial Venus and Theseus fully responds.



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Indeed, although Alcamenes, who began the Venus of the Gardens, is called by Pliny a disciple of Phidias, it is no less true that he must have begun a career in art before him; for he was the author of one of the pediments of the temple of Jupiter at Olympus, pediments that have a more ancient character than any of the works of Phidias known to us. A native of Athens, he came back there to compete against Agoracrites, the student most favoured by Phidias, in a competition for the execution of a Venus, and he beat him; he competed next with Phidias himself, in another competition for the execution of a Minerva, and this time he came out second. Phidias commissioned him to execute one of the pediments of the Parthenon. It must be concluded from these facts that after having tested his mettle against the author of the Parthenon Minerva, of the Jupiter of Olympia and many other master-works, he resigned himself to becoming the collaborator of his former competitor in the great works ordered by Pericles. It is understandable, consequently, that when he came to die, leaving incomplete the Venus of the Gardens, of which Phidias had perhaps dictated the composition to him, it was incumbent on Phidias to finish it, and he did this in impressing on the joint work the seal of his genius. Cicero says: ‘One can always recognize Phidias, either when he has executed a work alone, or when he finishes a work started by another.’ These words relate, as it would seem, to the Venus of the Gardens. In the group of Venus and Theseus, the latter figure has characteristics that are in many ways archaic, as we have seen, and, moreover, resembles in a striking way, in his attitude, one of the figures from the pediment executed by Alcamenes at Olympia, namely the warrior to the left of Jupiter. We should add that Alcamenes made the statue of Mars in the temple in Athens dedicated to him. From these circumstances, it can be concluded, it would seem, that Alcamenes had begun the monument of the Gardens early during his stay in Athens, when he had not yet assimilated Phidias’s style; that he worked first on the second figure, in forming it according to a model familiar to him and which he had perhaps created; that Phidias changed nothing in it, at least nothing important, and that he addressed his own efforts to the Venus above all. In this way it is possible to explain, at one and the same time, why the hero has elements of a still archaic harshness while the goddess has a charming nature. The group presented then an important monument to the progress of art at the beginning of the fifth century, a development in which the greatest sculptors of this century, took art near to its ultimate perfection, which, according to the ancients, Praxiteles and Lysippus attained. * The Venus of the Gardens thus restored, we can now seek to determine what happened to it in the imitations made of it. The group represented a religious idea of a very general nature in a wholly Athenian form. Reproduced outside of Athens, it must have lost, in most of the

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reproductions, the local character impressed on it by the presence of the most excellent Attic hero, and even, often, the special mythological character which bound it to an idea of heroism and its destiny. Of Theseus-Mars most often only Mars is retained, and of Venus-Proserpine only Venus. The group became thus, such as we see it in a number of works of sculpture and glyptic, a simple assemblage of Venus and Mars. Thus understood, it offered, as we have seen, a contradiction: Venus, wife of a god, in a position that the latter should occupy. There was no recoil before this anomaly; without it being acknowledged, the desire prevailed to have a monument, consecrated by universal admiration, express the union, simply as it is, of two divinities. Moreover, in the course of the centuries, the primitive conception of the union of Mars and Venus in a conjugal group was replaced by the fable, which ended up making the former almost entirely forgotten, of their adulterous affairs. Consequently, there was no longer any difficulty in giving, in a group of Venus and Mars, the second rank to the latter. The idea would also arise, following common custom in ancient art, of transposing to other divinities, if not the same conception, then at least the same arrangement. I signalled an example of this in the group of the royal palace of Turin in which the Venus de Milo has become a Hygia and the Theseus-Mars an Asclepius. In the end, the principal figure, the most attractive one, which bore the particular imprint of the most renowned of the authors of the work, was often detached from the ensemble. The composition represented, in sum, the victory of gentleness over violence. This is what the author of the imperial medal on which our group was reproduced rendered by this exergue: Veneri victrici. This idea of the victory of Venus easily gave rise to the identification of Venus with Victory itself, a divinity with which, from a different point of view, the female warrior Pallas had also been identified. An intermediate invention which led to that point consisted in representing Venus playing with Mars’s weapons. A statue in the Louvre shows her arming herself with a sword, while an Eros beside her dons a helmet. In this way, there was a return, but on the basis of a frivolous idea, to the ancient custom of representing Venus armed. In some verses of Apollonius of Rhodes that – as has been claimed, with apparently substantial justification – describe a figurative monument, like many pieces of the Anthology, Venus uses Mars’s shield as a mirror in which she looks at herself. This is a subject that a medal from Corinth also seems to represent. Millingen thought that it was according to this arrangement that the Venus de Milo had to be interpreted and restored. De Clarac, in his Musée de sculpture, and others, Overbeck among them, have rallied to this opinion. However, if the figure is made to face the spectator and hold a shield in this way, this accessory partially conceals her to the spectator; and if, to avoid this inconvenience, she is placed in profile, another impossibility is encountered, namely that of admitting that an isolated figure in the round



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should have been made to be considered in profile. This is a difficulty that cannot be resolved in supposing that the figure had a counterpart, that another figure responded to it, one wholly or almost symmetrical; this could be the case for the Venus of Madrid, since its base, sufficiently conserved, of an oval form, indicates that she was alone on it. But the same does not apply, as we have seen, to the Venus de Milo, and not to, as we have also seen, the model it reproduces. And nothing, in the case occupying us, authorizes such a supposition. In the Venus holding a shield there is but a modification of the primitive theme, first of all imagined for a bas-relief, which was then able to be employed, though wrongfully, for a figure in the round. A bas-relief decorating the base of Trajan’s column includes a Victory holding a shield on which she is writing. And it is easy to recognize in it the type of the Venus de Milo.20 It is in the same way that this prototype was transformed, on the sarcophagi of a still later period, into a Fortuna, recognizable by the wheel on which the left foot is posed. In the bronze statue of the museum of Brescia an alteration of the original model has served to form an isolated Victory in the round. To do this, it was necessary to change, beyond the movement of the head, that of the two arms. The artist, indeed, has disposed them in such a way, in having them extend further in front of the body, that the goddess is able to face the spectators without the shield hiding her from them. The artist, moreover, has not dissimulated the freedom taken with regard to the classical model that he was using; for he has changed without needing to the way the cloak falls, which, in all the other reproductions of this model, is invariably the same. In these different modifications of the original work, the movement of torsion of the upper part of the body on the lower part has been made to disappear, and the inclination of the head has changed. These changes have taken away some of the figure’s charm. It has become less sinuous in its attitude, more severe or, at least, more insignificant in its expression. The original composition remains to a greater degree in the use that was often made of it for the decoration of sepulchres. It can be found, indeed, on two sarcophagi, of which one was part of the old Mattei Roman collection, and the other can still be seen in Pisa’s Campo Santo, as well as in the statuary groups of the Louvre, of the Capitoline Museum, of the Villa Borghese and of Florence, which must have served to decorate tombs. In all these monuments the two characters clearly represent a married couple divinized into Mars and Venus. To these can be rightly related the slightly different sepulchral decorations of a late Roman period showing man and wife holding hands in the presence either of Eros, or of Juno in the role, in which she succeeded Venus, of the patron of marriage.

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In the groups in question, the husband is to the left, the wife to the right, and it is the same in Christian funerary monuments. The imitation of a composition that had become classic, but whose original meaning had become obscure, won out in this way over what was required, concerning the respective disposition of the spouses, by the universal custom, one both religious and civil. The monuments thus offer in the attitudes and expressions a singular discordance in comparison to the respective dispositions of the figures. The male figure has now nothing in his bearing suggesting that he is of a less elevated rank than the goddess; on the contrary, his raised head seems to suggest superiority, and yet it is the goddess, always, who has the place of honour. Another use to which the composition of the group of the Gardens of Athens was adapted was the decoration of theatres, and there it was able to retain or regain almost entirely its original significance. Venus is honoured in the theatres, says a Latin author: Colitur Venus in theatris. The Venus of Capua and that of Falerone were found among the ruins of the theatres of these cities. The hiding place where the Venus de Milo was buried was not far from the ruins of the unfinished theatre of the island; it is likely that she was destined for the theatre and had been provisionally placed nearby so as to be placed there when it was finished. The Venuses of Capua and Falerone are reproductions of the same type as the Venus de Milo. Erected in a similar situation, these different monuments would have served the expression of the same idea, which must have been what had inspired the prototype from which they derived. Greek drama seems to have had as it principal objective, not, as has often been said, to show humanity pursued by fatality or by jealous and malevolent powers, but rather to show it making its way, by the ordeals that filled the life of its heroes, to an eternal repose; an identical objective, at bottom, to that of the principal mysteries; and this is why it was not without reason that Aeschylus was accused of revealing the secrets of Eleusis. Tragedy originally involved, in addition to the choir, just one character. This must have been the son of Jupiter who, torn apart by the spirits of a terrestrial and savage nature called the Titans, had come back to life to become with Proserpine – like Osiris, similarly ill-treated, with Isis – prince of the blessed regions. Always seeing the same story was boring, and, despite protestations of vulgarity, of which we have a record, in place of Bacchus, heroes who had experienced ordeals similar to his were presented on the tragic stage. Consequently, and given these resemblances between diverse fates, the day came when one honoured, as presiding over the theatre, a deity who steered human destinies from a higher position, through all vicissitudes, to a favourable denouement. Everything came together from everywhere to prepare for a new religious era in which, as embodying divine beneficence – in which a world that expected little from itself sought recourse – the gentle symbol of love of ancient times, the mystical dove was to reappear. The theatre, therefore, had to place itself



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increasingly under the invocation of Venus, of Venus understood once again as she was understood in the ancient belief that had passed from Syria to Athens, featuring a great power able to dissipate storms and establish calm, the calm that almost all doctrines, with the name of ‘ataraxia’, invoked. But perhaps nowhere as much as in Milo was one inclined to understand the monument from the Garden of Athens in its original meaning, and to require that a faithful, at least in its essential aspects, reproduction of it preside over the theatre. The name of Melos seems to have as a root the Greek word meaning apple, or more generally fruit. This was an allusion, perhaps, to the form of the island, which is quite round. Perhaps it was also a form of consecration to Venus, patron of the Gardens, goddess of fruits as of flowers. Medals from Melos bear on their back, perhaps by allusion to these facts and ideas, a half-open flower, which seems to be an apple blossom. On the other hand, on a medal from Magnesia on the Meander, a city in Asia Minor, that had, perhaps, friendly and commercial relations with Melos, a woman can be seen with the exergue: To the Venus of the Milians. We have to conclude that Venus was the object of a very particular cult in Melos, and even that she was probably the patron of the island. If this was the case, it was natural that Melos procured, for the meaningful decoration of its theatre, an imitation of one of the most beautiful images of Venus ever produced by the Greek chisel. Melos, furthermore, had been conquered and colonized in the fifth century by the Athenians. Lysander dispossessed them of it, and submitted the island to Lacedemonia, and then nothing further is known about what followed. But it is permitted to presume that the Athenian colony, which cannot have entirely disappeared, regained the upper hand. Nothing was more proper to the Attic genius than to develop the resources furnished to Melos by its maritime situation. The island had become rich and aimed to give itself a theatre; construction began, though it could not complete it, on a grand scale. Nothing more natural, again, to suppose that it wanted to install in it, with an image of an exceptional beauty, the goddess who was at once its patron and, in her capacity as the superior regent of destiny, the patron of dramatic poetry, and that it drew this image from the Athenian monument in which Celestial Venus was represented in this great role. In this way it can easily be explained why it was in Milo that perhaps one of the most beautiful repetitions ever executed of the Venus of the Gardens, and, at the same time, one of the most faithful, came to be found. In a time when the custom had been established of representing Venus either naked or at least half-naked in order to present in her a complete model of all beauties, Melos could have preferred that the artist, one who was to execute for its theatre an imitation of the master work of Alcamenes and Phidias remove the tunic that the religious severity of the customs of the fifth century had required. The Venus de Milo was to keep from the costume of its prototype only the coat

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enveloping the lower part of the body. It is possible that the original Venus was not holding a fruit; that, for example, in accordance with the motif presented by the group found in Locris, she was leaning with her two hands crossed on the shoulder of her companion. Melos must have preferred, in any case, that its own Venus held an apple. In this way, it represented, at the same time as the queen of the heavens, the special patron of the island whose form was that of a fruit, and which had adopted a flower as an insignia. Finally, it can easily be understood both why Venus de Milo had a special cult on this island, which is attested to by the Magnesia medal and the rich ornamentation with which, in a later period, it was thought fitting to adorn her; and also why, in the time of Christianity’s violent struggle against Paganism, when the then prevalent conceptions of the goddess of Cythera and Cyprus were recalled in the presence of the symbols of this religion, that ardent adepts of the new faith inflicted on her, as a sign of aversion and as a curse, all sorts of outrages. One thereby attacked in the Celestial Venus only the inferior Venus who gradually had obscured the former. The moment was long gone when it was possible to recognize in the dove-goddess, mistress of the world by her gentleness alone, a prophetic figure of divinity in whose name an imperfectly enlightened zeal smashed into pieces one of its most august and at the same time most gracious images. In sum, if my approach is not erroneous, the Venus de Milo is a reproduction, a free one in many respects, executed in the century of Alexander, of a model created in Athens in the century of Pericles. In the original composition, as in the reproduction to which the Venus de Milo belonged, the goddess, who was the Venus Urania of ancient times, welcomed into the Elysian domain, as her future spouse, and in raising him thus to the rank of Mars, the hero in which Athens honoured its founder and tutelary spirit, and whose superhuman generosity had merited this honour. The group of Urania and Theseus represented thus in a monument, in which the greatest sculptor had put all of his art, the idea that dominated the religion and civilization of Greece, and of Athens above all. Athens honoured in Minerva, its patron, the warrior virgin conceived as the spirit that guided it in all its earthly enterprises; it honoured in Celestial Venus the still superior spirit inspiring the gentleness of which the city of Minerva made its highest virtue, a spirit which, beyond terrestrial life, crowned this virtue with eternal felicity. The composition often served as a funerary emblem promising immortality. She must also have presided, in theatres, over the representations played out there of human destinies. She probably presided over them in Melos, specially dedicated to the cult of the great goddess.



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Figure 6.1  The Venus de Milo seen from the angle preferred by Ravaisson

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Figure 6.2  Ravaisson’s reconstruction of the Venus de Milo with Theseus



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Notes 1. [Janicaud: Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405: ‘The goddess revealed herself by her gait.’] 2. Figure 6.1. 3. Skiagrafi/a, adumbratio. 4. ‘Et nunc magna mei sub terra ibit imago’; Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 604. [Janicaud: This is, in fact, verse 654 of Aeneid IV: ‘And now my great shadow will descend onto the earth.’] 5. Quintil., II, 13: ‘Nam recti quidem corporis vel minima gratia est.’ [Janicaud: Citation from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria: ‘For the grace of regular body is certainly the weakest.’] 6. [Janicaud: Same passage of the Aeneid as note 1, but Ravaisson has removed what separates avertens (in turning away) from verse 405.] 7. See Clarac, Venus de Milo, p. 54. 8. In Delphi, an Aphrodite e0pitumbia. Certain authors identity the Roman goddess of death, Libitina, with Proserpine, others with Venus. See Welcker, Griechische Götterlehre, p. 716. 9. Mars husband of Venus in Pindar, Pythian, IV, 87 and Aeschylus, Supplices, 639. 10. See Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 437. 11. [Janicaud: see Catulli Liber, ed. M Schuster, 13 v.12.] 12. [Janicaud: ‘I subjugated Mars without Mars.’ Ravaisson is making an allusion to Lucretius, De natura rerum, I, vv.31–40.] 13. On one of the bas-reliefs in the museum of Latran, in Rome, Eros points an arrow at a warrior similar in attitude, costume and proportions to the Borghese Mars, and who is putting down his sword. In the group of the Villa Borghese an Eros accompanied Venus. 14. Allow me to refer here to what I said of Lysippus’s style in Hercules e)pitrape/zioj (Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, 1888). 15. Bernoulli, in his Aphrodite. 16. )Antwpa_ th=j o)/psewj. 17. See the paper I gave on 11th November 1885 at the Ecole spéciale d’architecture, with the title: Un musée de moulages d’antiques, p. 25. 18. Ibid., pp. 26–7. 19. De Instutio oratoria, II, 13: ‘Quid tam distortum et elaboratum quam est ille discobolos Myronis?’ [‘Which work is as twisted and elaborate as Myron’s discobolus’]. 20. The Museum of the Louvre possesses a drawing executed from the bas-relief by Nicolas Poussin.

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7 Greek Funerary Monuments The study of Greek funerary monuments is a subject of exceptional interest, for it is impossible that such monuments should bear no trace of what those who made them thought about life and death. What could be more interesting than knowing, about human destiny, the thoughts of a people of such penetrating intelligence, to whom we owe science, philosophy and art? Since the beginning of the century, the predominant view in archaeology has been that the bas-reliefs with which the Greeks adorned their tombs provide no evidence of any belief in an existence beyond the grave. According to this view, the ancients, satisfied with terrestrial life, were hardly concerned with these dreams of another world that trouble the moderns, and, consequently, would only ever have represented scenes from here-below, either simple pictures of human life, and above all of family life, or of final adieux, or of honours being accorded to the memory of the dead. Such would have been the nature of the scenes with which tombs were adorned in the age when Greece was most herself and the furthest removed from the foreign elements that came later to adulterate its genius. In these ancient times, the inscriptions added to the representations generally shed little light on them. If the epitaph in verse conserved from the Athenians killed in the fifth-century siege of Potidaea tells us that their souls have gone into the ether, while the earth has kept hold of their bodies – expressions whose natural interpretation is that souls survive independently of the body and go to live with the gods –, the funerary inscriptions, in these ancient times, normally consists just of the name of the deceased, with an indication of the country or of the village where he was born. Before examining what is, in this question, the truth, let us study for a moment the verisimilitude; in order to discover what was the case, let us examine what probably was the case. In other words, of the two views, the one prevailing today that excludes from the funerary bas-reliefs any allusion to a future life, and the other, which I would like to substitute for it, seeing in the same bas-reliefs images or symbols of immortality, let us ask, before examining the monuments themselves, which seems to accord better with the nature of the milieu in which Greece, with its own ideas and customs, found itself.

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The world with which Greece was constantly in commerce, from Thrace to Asia and to Egypt, was full of the belief in immortality, and it was proclaimed throughout this world by funerary monuments. On this subject, obscurity is presently being dissipated, perhaps more so than ever before, at least concerning Egypt and Phoenicia. The tombs discovered on the plains of Saqqarah near Memphis and which belong to the most ancient era of Egypt are decorated with compositions showing the deceased, amidst rich estates full of flocks, fishing, sowing, harvesting or receiving gifts. Although he remarked that the wealth attributed to the deceased by the inscriptions added to the images is highly unlikely, Mariette explained these scenes as representing the deceased during his life or honoured after his death by his children and slaves, and added that the intention of such representations was to remind the living to offer the customary funerary sacrifices to the deceased. A few years ago, after I demonstrated or sought to demonstrate, in publishing the ‘Monument de Myrrhine’,1 that the funerary bas-reliefs of the Greeks always offered representations or symbols of a future life, it occurred to me that it must have been the same for the other peoples of antiquity, and for the Egyptians in particular, who were always occupied by the next life, and I proposed to the erudite curator of the Egyptian department of our own museum (Pierret) an interpretation of the scenes adorning the tombs of Saqqarah and elsewhere, according to which they presented images of felicity from beyond the grave. And very recently, Mariette, returning to the explanation that he had previously provided, has just declared that in his opinion the scenes pictured on the ancient mastabas of Saqqarah are depictions of an ideal world, a felicitous domain. A year after the publication of my research, Halévy proposed, in a dissertation read to the Académie des Inscriptions, that the idea of immortality had great importance in the national beliefs of all the Semitic peoples. In the ensuing debate on this question, the figurative monuments had no place; but a circumstance presented by one of the Phoenician tombs brought to the Louvre from Aradus and Sidon by Renan – a circumstance that made me notice the similarities in the funerary monuments of Greece and Etruria – seems to me to provide a new argument to support Halévy’s thesis. On Greek painted vases, funerary stelae are often shown adorned with crimson garlands and small bottles of perfume: these bottles, with crowns of flowers, are in the hand of the deceased who are lying down and, on Etruscan tombs, sometimes asleep. Consider also that on a number of Egyptian, Greek and Lycian stelae of ancient times the deceased are pictured inhaling the scent of a flower. But the perfume bottle represents the same ideas as the fragrant flower. On the Phoenician tombs, the deceased are often stretched out on their backs, but with eyes open, which indicates, if I am not mistaken, that in resting they still live, and one of them has the little perfume bottle of the Greek stelae and Etruscan tombs. It seems clear that this is a symbol of eternal felicity.



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Until recently, we knew nothing of what Assyria might have thought about an existence after death. Now we have not only an Assyrian poem whose principal subject is the descent of a goddess into hell when searching for a mortal that she will rescue from there, but also an Assyrian bas-relief recently discovered that, according to Clermont-Ganneau, represents the infernal world. All peoples, and in this he agrees with Halévy’s thesis, must have had, along with their theory of immortality, their book of the dead. I dare to predict that when the decorations of Assyrian tombs are discovered, these decorations will contain, like those I have just indicated in a Phoenician sarcophagus, more or less expressive symbols of life and felicity beyond the grave. Now, if the peoples with whom the Greeks were constantly in relation, and whose ideas and customs exercised on their ideas and customs an evident influence, gave expression on their tombs, by means of the images with which they adorned them, to their belief in a life after this life, is it likely that the Greeks remained entirely foreign to this? In their literature, from the oldest times, the thought of immortality was prominent. It is forcefully expressed in Homer: Achilles, preparing to burn the body of Patroclus, his friend, puts on the pyre weapons, clothes, prisoners whose throat he has cut, which is to say that, following a custom found in almost all peoples of a corresponding epoch of civilization, he placed next to the deceased what the latter liked the most or what could satisfy him the most in a new existence, one similar, it would seem, to terrestrial existence. The Odyssey presents a world in which shadows similar to living people move, in which they have, in truth, a precarious existence like this other set of shadows in the Hebraic Scheol or hell, but where Tiresias preserves, like Samuel in the Bible, the ability to foresee and announce the future, a future in which the hunter Orion still hunts wild beasts, in which Hercules has still the bow in hand and is still feared as he was on earth. Hesiod, whose epoch was probably close to that of Homer, puts the dead heroes in a felicitous domain. Pindar depicts this domain as composed of islands where only fruit and golden flowers are to be seen, and whose inhabitants surrender themselves to choirs of dance and music. Sophocles’ Antigone expresses the hope that having fulfilled, on their graves, her filial duty towards her family, she will be welcomed by them in the other world. In a funeral oration for warriors fallen in battle, composed, as Plato claims, by Aspasie for Pericles, who was to deliver it, the warriors are promised that they will be welcomed in the underworld by the heroes who proceeded them. And it is certain that this funeral oration was solemnly pronounced periodically. Divine honours were instituted for the warriors who fell at Marathon. In the time of Plutarch, a formal feast was still held in honour of the Greeks killed in the battle of Plataea, a solemn feast with rites showing that the deceased were considered as still existing. The belief in immortality was, therefore, a general belief. It was expressed every day at funerals. The dead were washed, they were anointed with perfumed oil, crowned with flowers as were the living at banquets, and particularly for the solemn banquet

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of the Mysteries, where one sat at the table of the gods. The dead were enveloped in white or crimson shrouds; white, colour of the brightest light, that of the sun when it shines at it zenith; crimson, colour of the sun as seen through the mists of dawn and dusk; they were also the colours reserved for gods and kings. People wept for the dead at home only; this was, at least, one of Solon’s prescriptions, a prescription reiterated by Plato in his Laws. The procession had the character of a triumphal march. The dead were described, indeed, as blessed. The tomb to which they were taken was a place where everything had to express the thought signalled by such a description. The tomb comprised two essential elements, as it were, already distinguished by Homer: the tomb properly speaking, tu&mboj, where the corpse was laid, and the stele, or column that was erected above it, just in front or to the side of it, to represent what remained of the dead, whether it was called shadow, image or soul. Indeed, the stele was adorned with garlands or ribbons; crowns were placed on it and, as I said above, perfume bottles; it was anointed with oil, sprinkled with libations, and foodstuffs were placed on its higher part. All this was addressed to the immortal being depicted on the stone. Often the name of the deceased was inscribed on it, and that was already a kind of apotheosis. Moreover, often carved in the stone were forms recalling humanity, which terminated in the shape of a beautiful plant of powerful vegetation in order to express the idea of life reborn, life stronger than death. Finally, the stele was often decorated with bas-reliefs. Why would one think that on these bas-reliefs naturally recalling that the deceased had become immortal, only scenes of sadness or scenes from a past life were depicted? One circumstance has led to their being interpreted in this way: the attitudes, the bearing of the heads of those depicted have a melancholy air. A number of these funerary stelae, on some of which there are figures expressing such an attitude and bearing, present people who are clearly of the same family, naturally holding each other’s hands. These were thought to amount to final adieux, and in archaeology these pictures have been named ‘departure scenes’. Nevertheless, the funerary bas-relief found in Athens, dedicated to a young girl named Myrrhine, which I published, as I said, five years ago, shows the deceased led by the hand of the god Mercury who was also known as the ‘leader of souls’. Evidently, he is leading her to the eternal abode. Her family is gathered before her, and this could mean either that it is with her in the same abode, as I said, or that it contemplates, from earth, the young girl that it has lost. In any case, the head of this family raises his hand in a sign of admiration. As for Myrrhine, far from following her guide with regret, as a German archaeologist has recently held, it is clear, in examining her expression, that she is smiling. Last year the Louvre received a funerary stele, also deriving from Athens, decorated with large figures. One of these figures is that of a woman sitting; another, that of a bearded man, probably her husband, who has just taken her hand. Yet the woman is smiling as she receives him. In these two monuments, therefore, it is not a matter of separation or of a final farewell. The smile of the two women is, in this



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regard, a decisive proof, and evidently it should enable us to interpret differently – to the way in which one had done before I publicized the monument of Myrrhine – the numerous pictures called departure or separation scenes. If we now examine more closely these monuments, and the bowing of the heads which was thought to express sadness, it should be recognized that these show nothing other than signs gladly expressing tender affections; and every time there is some expression in the features of the face, which there is in a number of cases, when the figures are large enough, and the work of sufficient detail, this expression shows itself to be one of tenderness and happiness. Here is a third example: that of the famous composition which is generally taken to show Mercury separating Eurydice from Orpheus in order to take her to the underworld; a composition known by means of three iterations of which the most beautiful and the most ancient belongs to our museum of antiquities. In reality, this is a funerary bas-relief which shows Mercury leading a wife to her husband. The latter bears a lyre, but also a helmet that could in no way belong to Orpheus, the Thracian priest in a long robe, as Virgil calls him. It is much rather a hero who, according to the idea that ancient poets give of the existence of heroes beyond the grave, either continues to fight, or relaxes by playing the lyre. I would suggest, in fact, that the hero represented in this bas-relief is Achilles, whom a famous intaglio of the Department of Antiques in our Bibliothèque Nationale presents as at rest and playing the lyre. Following a tradition maintained by some of the poets, Achilles was placed by the gods, after his death, on the island of Leuce, the white island, white the colour of light, that they made emerge from Pontus-Euxinis to receive him after his death, and Helen became his wife there. This would be a composition employed on tombs to represent, in a form borrowed from heroic times, a conjugal union in a future life. The composition is this: the wife has been brought by Mercury, like Myrrhine, the right hand in the left hand of the god; then she moves one step beyond the god, without completely letting go of his hand, so as to place her left hand on the right shoulder of the hero; the latter turns towards the woman who has just touched him and raises his hand to take hers. This is the moment preceding the joining of hands depicted in all the supposed separation scenes. But, in the Louvre’s own example, it is easy to see on the faces of the couple a slight smile. This is not to say that on these funerary bas-reliefs the idea of death, of a supreme separation, and the expression of pain, are never to be found. Sometimes they appear; but it is in order to bring out the idea of another life and of happy immortality. I have noticed a striking example of this in a bas-relief deriving probably from Athens, like those that I have just spoken about, and in which the principal subject is a young woman lying on a bed. Other women gather around her. In front of her is an old man, visibly overcome, her father or her husband. But she rises up from her bed, and one of the female company address to her an evocative gesture with her hand. I do not think I am mistaken in seeing in this picture the expression of a coming back

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to life, of the passage from death to eternal life. If I had enough time, I would add to this example of a sort of resurrection a comparable one offered by a painted vase, still uncatalogued, but which I will publish shortly, from our Department of Antiques. To return to the ‘departure scenes’, in my work on the monument of Myrrhine, I highlighted that in these scenes the attitudes and the movements of those shaking hands in no way indicates that they are separating from each other. Greek artists knew well how to express this action on the vases showing either Amphiarus leaving, to attend the siege of Troy, his wife Eriphyle, or Neoptolemus taking his leave, also to attend the siege of Troy, from his mother Deidamie and of his grandfather Lycomedes: why would they not have been able to do this in the supposed departure scenes, if they had really wanted to show people in the process of separating? In these scenes, there is normally someone at rest, either standing up, or, as is more often the case, sitting down, and a second, who, far from preparing him or herself for leaving the former, moves towards the former to take his or her hand. This makes it clear that it is a matter not of separation, but of reunion. On a bas-relief of this type, two people holding hands are sitting in front of one another: this is perhaps a way of indicating that they are at rest and reunited in an abode of peace and stability. The dead in Elysium were not only happy; they were, according to the Greeks, in a condition comparable, in every respect, to that of the gods. On the funerary stelae, this idea is often expressed by the contrast of their size, enlarged, to that of the people still living on earth. On the monument of Myrrhine, for example, Myrrhine herself is the same size as Mercury; her family contemplating her, is of a smaller size. This is enough to signal that the young woman has become a divine being. On a good number of other funerary bas-reliefs on which the deceased are depicted either with the features of one of the gods, or as a hero fighting or galloping on horseback, or at rest, a cup in hand, or lying down in front of a laid table, the presence of other, smaller people, sometimes even of very exiguous dimensions, serves to express the same idea that an existence similar to the one it has terminated, but of a higher order, follows on from death. A consequence of everything that I have just said is that in the pictures decorating Greek funerary stelae, the principal persons depicted, if not all of them, are not on earth, but indeed in this blessed abode that was called Elysium. The secondary persons belonging to the family, or at least to the house of the deceased, can be considered, particularly when of a smaller size, as still being on earth; the principal persons, the deceased, are in the underworld, on the blessed islands, or in the sky, according to the different ideas prevailing, in different periods, about the domain of the dead. These compositions have a similar form, therefore, to the paintings of the Middle Ages depicting the Madonna and saints on one side, and the devout kneeling down before them on the other, the former belonging to a celestial region, the latter belonging to the earth.



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I will add that on Greek funerary bas-reliefs, just as on those of the Egyptians, the figures still belonging to the earth often make a gesture with their hand meaning admiration or adoration. These bas-reliefs are thus analogous to those dedicated to gods, and which show, before the latter, persons who adore them with their right hand raised towards them, or who offer them a sacrifice. The thesis that I have just presented to you in a summary fashion, one contradicting received ideas, concerning both the supposed departure scenes and Greek funerary bas-reliefs in general, was hardly well received when I first produced it, at least in the country where archaeology is cultivated on the grandest scale, by our neighbours across the Rhine. Still, a German specialist in antiquities (Milchhoefer) has just been led by the study of numerous monuments from the Peloponnese to adopt, at least partially, the ideas that I proposed for the explanation of the funerary bas-reliefs; and, after him, other archaeologists have shown some inclination to accommodate their views to these ideas. I think I can announce without temerity that soon the views that I have had to combat will hardly have any adherents. Once this new interpretation of Greek funerary bas-reliefs has been established, I dare say that numerous consequences, of considerable import, will emerge from it. First, it will be possible to explain Roman funerary bas-reliefs – of this people whose religious beliefs were, in essence, the same as those of the Greeks – in the same way. Erudite Germany has undertaken two large publications for which it has been collating materials for several years, one on the subject of Greek funerary stelae, and the other on the subject of sarcophagi belonging generally to the epoch that is called Roman. I dare to claim, and I aim to establish this very soon with some examples, that the monuments of the second series can be explained, when they are studied closely and in comparing them each to the other, by the same general principle that I used to explain the monuments in the first. Second, there exist many other funerary monuments, recognized as such by everybody, than the bas-reliefs on the stelae and sarcophagi, namely statues and busts, vases, murals etc.; these monuments will obviously have to be interpreted according to the same ideas as the bas-reliefs. Third, many other monuments remain from antiquity that have not yet been classified among those dedicated to the dead, and the theory itself that I have presented to you will help to classify them thus. Take, for example, the bas-reliefs in which had previously been seen either images of divinities strictly speaking (like those representing a man on horseback, or a man sitting, a cup or flower in hand), or, in contrast, what are today called genre subjects, in which – once one is apprised of the variety of forms in which antiquity represented the blessed life – samples of this types of representation can easily be recognized. I will limit myself to noting as an example the beautiful composition whose many reproductions are familiar to us, and in which it was thought that Bacchus was receiving the hospitality of the Athenian Icarus. In this composition, a young married couple are on the left

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on a bed, in front of a table spread; this is the picture offered by the bas-reliefs, so numerous, which most specialists have named ‘funerary feasts’ because they saw in them images of the feast that those surviving the deceased dedicated to him, and in which others want to see simple ‘family meals’ during life, but which must be understood, as I have attempted to prove, as Elysian banquets. On the right of our bas-relief, Bacchus arrives, followed by his normal cortege formed of Silene, satyrs and maenads; a young satyr unties his shoe; the god is going to take his place at the table of the couple; the husband raises his right hand as a sign of admiration; the woman watches, attentively, her chin resting on her hand. To receive such a visitor is evidently an honour awarded to them unexpectedly. We can now provide an explanation of the whole picture which, in bringing it back to the well-populated class of funerary monuments, allows us to understand at the same time why many reproductions of it exist. Bacchus was often considered to be the sovereign of the empire of the blessed; this empire is called somewhere the Garden. The author of the bas-relief wanted to represent two blessed inhabitants of the eternal domains, whose repast the god, prince of these domains, comes to share. I will add that this blessed couple is really, as in the figures of a bas-relief that I was discussing just a moment ago, Achilles and Helen. It used to be said that the gods sometimes came to visit Achilles and Helen on the mysterious island that had been created for them. – In our museums, there exist bas-reliefs representing dancers with hands intertwined, in poses full of grace, or the dances of satyrs or maenads: these are quite probably friezes detached from tombs and which represent the leisure of Elysium. It is the same with other bas-reliefs representing scenes from rural and pastoral life, scenes which are also to be found on sarcophagi from the Roman epoch: as it would seem, these are figures of Elysian felicity. In the numerous monuments whose funerary origin is recognized, but whose meaning is still controversial, one should not forget the terracotta figurines that have emerged in such great number from the tombs of Asia Minor, southern Italy, Cyrenaica and more recently from Tanagra, in Boeotia. Among the scholars who have studied them, some see in them infernal divinities, which is what most of the ancient divinities were; others saw in them only objects of pure fantasy, placed with the dead, with their clothes, their arms, their vases, their jewels, because they were part, during their life, of the preferred adornments of their houses. If it is remarked, as indeed it often has been, that these figurines represent above all young people and children, that grace and cheerfulness are their most common characteristics, and that a large number of the others offer caricatures that seem to be made only to please, and if these objects from compositions decorating vases placed in tombs are related to more recent periods in which subjects of a gracious nature predominate, one will soon come to interpret the figurines in question, in conformity with the spirit of the thesis I have proposed, as representing a sort of cortege or, as one used



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to say in speaking of Bacchus’s ordinary entourage, a sort of thiase, supposed to contribute to the delights of the Elysian life. I have just mentioned painted vases: the greater part of the ornate painted vases deriving, prodigiously, from Italy and Greece, should be brought together with the terracotta figurines in order to extend our theory to them. The quite diverse subjects with which they are decorated has been explained, until now, by mythology, but without trying to relate them to the nature of the monuments where one had found them, or without successfully doing so. It will become increasingly clear, if I am not mistaken, that these subjects, borrowed from mythology most of the time, are the only ones from all those mythology can offer, or almost the only ones, able to provide expressions either of a future felicity – and such are the compositions in which Bacchus and Apollo, who presided over Elysian life, play the leading role – or of efforts through which such felicity is attained, and such are the compositions featuring the exploits of Achilles, Ulysses and Theseus, and, above all, of the prince of heroes, namely Hercules. The painted vases, like the terracotta figures, at least for the most part, were clearly produced deliberately to be placed in tombs. Several proofs can be provided for this. Most of the time, they were essentially symbolic objects, destined to represent things supposed to be useful for the deceased in his or her new existence, and consequently it was natural that the vases were decorated with subjects most directly related to the ideas enveloped by the idea of a future life. In the end, after having studied, with all the funerary monuments, all the diverse objects constituting or contained in that genre, the views that I have just presented to you ought to be extended still further to an infinity of diverse products of political art. The walls of the buildings of Herculaneum and Pompeii were decorated with more or less fantastical images, in which nothing common has been found that could serve to order them under the same idea. But if we notice among them the numerous representations of edifices of a lightness that is not of this world and which have, so to speak, an aerial character, as well as the strange landscapes showing us, like most Chinese art, a world of marvels otherwise seen only in dreams, we will arrive, I think, at the idea that I am proposing to you, that they are images or symbols of a divine world. These representations, first discovered in the sixteenth century in the grottos of the baths of Rome, and in which Raphael and his pupils borrowed the forms of compositions subsequently called grotesque (today one is more inclined to say arabesque) with which they adorned the Vatican, are, if I am not mistaken, figures of an imaginary world, whose raison d’être is the idea of a existence similar, but also superior, to the one that is the lot of the inhabitants of the earth. Henceforth it will be necessary to explain the great number of ancient works of art previously held to be but arbitrary, of a capriciousness without rule, as variegated forms through which formerly the imagination was content to depict the idea, that dominated it, of an order of things wholly similar to, but more excellent than that in which we live.

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I will add that this conception seems to me to have to be considered as the key to Greek art. If Greek art rose so high, this is, as some say, because it was able to see nature as it is, which an Assyrian or Egyptian saw only imperfectly; because, say others, it was able to conceive an ideal against which it reformed the real. The truth is, as it seems to me, that if Greek religion consists above all in conceiving divinity as similar and at the same time superior to man, and, as a model for which humanity, the highest part of nature, suggests to us the idea, Greek art, analogously, arose from the conception, similar to that of Pythagoras’ numbers or Plato’s ideas, of more perfect examples of everything that we see, examples that what we see leads us to conceive. One means of inventing, said Leonardo da Vinci, is to look at confused things: the mind draws from them forms and movements that, by itself, it would never have suspected. Nature, which Plato sometimes described as an admixture of ideas, was for the Greek imagination a confused thing by which a superior order of things is revealed to the soul, a knowledge of which lay dormant in the latter. And it was this order of things, always present to the imagination, which was the eternal one, and, so to speak, the sole object of art. The ancients generally depicted the earth as an obscure and opaque mass, bathing in a kind of atmosphere that was all light and transparency. Such was the thought that inspired Greek art, an idea whose expression was naturally the special task of the images that decorated funerary stelae, but which was invariably expressed, though with varying degrees of force and clarity, by all its productions. An Italian antiquary (Bellori) said a couple of centuries ago: ‘The ancients always depicted immortality on their graves.’ More can be said: immortality, or divine life, was the unique subject that ancient art treated everywhere, without ever tiring of it. If the idea that there exists above the real world an ideal and divine world, both the origin and the end, was a thought common to the whole of antiquity, one could ask why Greek art was superior to that of other nations, why it was perhaps, in truth, the only art. This is because, I would hazard, only the Greeks saw, or they saw better than anyone else at least, that the divine world is, in the end, the world of spirit, and took as the first principle the highest part of spirit itself. The philosopher, and the same can be said for Greek religion, had for his general and constant inspiration the idea announced in Greece’s most brilliant century by the master Pericles, namely that the principle of the world is intelligence. At the very origin of philosophy, another thinking was produced whose development was one day to carry the mind beyond the horizon, however vast, of Greece, according to which the first principle is what modern speculation has found to constitute the ground of intelligence itself, namely the ground of will that is love.2 From the time of Hesiod and Pherycedes the idea appears, indeed, that everything was originally drawn from an initial abyss by love, and it is by means of this idea that, as I have explained elsewhere,3 what was



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most particular to, and most eminent in Greek art can be understood. For other peoples, whom the Greeks considered under the general heading of ‘barbarians’, there predominated, in the understanding of the principles of things, the idea of power, to which, to an extent, intelligence was added; the same naturally applied to their art. The idea of love quickly revealed grace to the Greek genius, which is its natural expression, and, through grace, beauty. Consequently, the Hellenic genius understood first of all that there is in beauty something that goes beyond the domain of intelligence. An artist says to Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia: ‘There are in our art many things that man can learn; but the gods have kept the best in reserve.’4 This best was, indeed, what Leonardo da Vinci often called the divine, and which he signals by, above all, this quality in the movements through which what is really divine in the soul is revealed; and these movements are those in which grace resides. Let us cite another dictum of a great artist: ‘Grace is to art what faith is to religion’, which means, perhaps, that it is its ground and source. Yet with the objects belonging to this divine region, that one reached or rather returned to through death, transcending the human sphere of intelligence, antiquity always thought, though in a confused fashion, that the divine world could be conceived only as something similar to the visions occupying us in dreams. Already in Homer sleep and death are brothers. Polygnotus represents them reunited on the breast of Night, their mother, and often, as Lessing remarks in his famous dissertation on the ‘manner in which the ancients represented death’, it was in the form of a spirit of sleep that they represented death. And this was not, as Lessing contends, a euphemism, or a way of veiling a difficult thought; they certainly wanted, in substituting sleep for death, to indicate that death was merely sleep, and that is to say an interruption or suspension of life, which in no way excludes a new life, but which, on the contrary, prepares for it, and also that nothing could give a better idea of this new life to which sleep introduces us than the state into which enters the highest part of us, spirit, while the body is resting, namely dreaming. The further one goes back in antiquity, from the century (the fifth century before Christ) in which Death and Sleep, on painted vases, were depicted carrying in their arms a young man or woman apparently asleep, there come to proliferate, in Greece and in Italy, representations of the dead in a state of sleep in which they appear to dream. Take, for example, the bas-reliefs I presented during a meeting of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, in which one sees a young man sitting, with closed eyes, on a promontory, on the edge of the Ocean that bathes the eternal abode. – The Louvre Museum possesses a statue that repeats, with hardly any differences, spirits [génies] often seen on funerary bas-reliefs. This statue is that of a young man with long hair leaning against the trunk of a tree, with legs crossed, as a sign of rest, arms crossed above his head, and the head gently inclined. It has always been called the Genius of eternal repose, and this denomination is indeed fitting. But this young man is crowned with roses, his long hair is that of Eros in the famous statue

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of this god found in Centocelle; the features and the proportions are similar. The tree he is leaning on is a fig tree, a customary symbol of abundance. A soft smile crosses his lips. The Louvre statues unites, therefore, the elements which, over time, became dominant in the representations of death and immortality; this genius of eternal repose is Eros under a tree in the divine garden, at rest, in a sort of dream. Pindar had said: ‘Man is the dream of a shadow.’ The Louvre statue says: the future life of man, ideal and definitive life, is a dream such as the dreams of divinity can be – the divinity whom, well understood, is but love. To a more recent period than that of the Louvre’s Eros in Repose belongs a group that often figures on funerary monuments: the one formed by Eros and Psyche embracing. This shows that an advance has been made in the philosophy of love which occupied, after Hesiod and Pherecydes, the greatest of the Greek thinkers, and which affected all of Hellenistic art. The idea arose that the divinity does not only communicate with humanity, like divine light is communicated to earth, but that it loves humanity, and that, to allow humanity to approach it, it imposes forms of purifying torture that it suffers at the same time as demanding. Among the varied monuments of the legend of Psyche, or soul, and Eros, that Collignon has recently collected, look at those which show Eros burning in his flame the butterfly that is Pysche and at the same time tearfully turning his head away. The end of the story, represented by the group to be found in the Capitoline Museum, in the Uffizi in Florence and on a number of sarcophagi is the reunion of the god and the soul in the celestial abode. The Christians often borrowed from paganism this symbol for their graves, just as they borrowed from it the Good Shepherd who brings back a ewe on his shoulders and Orpheus taming wild beasts by harmony; the ideas to which these symbols respond were already the beginnings of Christianity. There is only one idea that does not appear on the funerary monuments foreign to the new religion: this is the one constituting, in fact, what is most particular to it, that of the divinity not only sympathizing with the miseries of the here-below, but descending from its own height in order to suffer them, in a word the idea of love finally understood in its depth, defined by sacrifice or voluntary annihilation, an idea that is the principle of another, more general idea, one still barely developed at the present time,5 namely that, in this world here-below, incapable of any form of selfsufficiency, nothing can exist without the condescendence or free self-abasement of a higher principle. We should stop here. This is the threshold of a different world to the one of which I am supposed to talk with you. In this modern world, we will hardly see, as we did in the one it has replaced, this perfectly harmonious correspondence between Nature and Spirit, between the terrestrial and the celestial, that was the condition most favourable to the perfection of figurative art. Consequently, it will no longer be beauty properly speaking that reigns here along with order, as it reigned in the Greek world, but rather the sublime, which transcends any order, the sublime resulting



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from the preponderance of spirit, which, extending itself onto everything, absorbs everything, so to speak, in its infinity. Greek art had shown divine life in a thousand forms provided or suggested to it by reality; the art succeeding it will gradually come to abandon images laden with too many terrestrial traits in order to respond to the ideal of spirituality to which thought henceforth aspires. To give the idea of divine life, principally on tombs, it will be enough to have a small number of representations in which figures of things of the air and of the superior regions, principally light and sound, will have a primary role. Think of Paradise in the paintings of an Orcagna or Fra Angelico in which one sees, in a luminous sphere, angels and seraphs singing and playing all sorts of instruments. The light, which makes everything visible, being itself the object particular to sight, is among visible things the one that has the greatest similarity to sound; and sound, a phenomenon attached to the movement of the air, is something that expresses the subtle nature of which air has always seemed to be able to give us some idea, I mean the soul, better than by anything that originates from sight. The modern genius, which has sought above all to make the soul speak, resides in the use of light and sound through which it has manifested itself the most. Leonardo da Vinci said that the task of painting was to paint the soul, and he found in the mysteries of chiaroscuro, as others after him did also, means of painting both the soul and, more generally, things of the divine order, which the ancients do not seem to have known so well. – And the successors of Phidias and Apelles in the art of suggesting the ideas of what the celestial world could be are, above all, it seems, together with the painters who render the mysteries of light and shadow, those such as Palestrina and Mozart, who found in music – through which, as the Greeks themselves said, the earth had been made subject to the law of the gods – the means of making apparent to the soul, or to what there is that is most divine in this world, what seems to be most sublime in the divinity. Once again, I do not want to enter into a realm of art different to that about which I proposed to speak to you today; but it was perhaps not pointless, in order to bring out even more clearly the distinctive character of the Greek world, to sketch in broad strokes the outlines of the world that followed it. If I am not mistaken, when it is contrasted to the modern epoch in which spirit seeks divine things in an entirely immaterial region, into which nothing carries us further than the dreams that music causes in us, one understands better the epoch in which they were sought in forms suffused with a large part of materiality, which were painted as if in a dream that would be more distinct to the mind’s eye, similar to physical eyes, by which the imagination sees.

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Notes 1.

See ‘Le monument de Myrrhine et les bas-reliefs funéraires des Grecs en général’ in Ravaisson, L’art et les mystères grecs, ed. D. Janicaud (Paris: L’Herne, 1985), pp. 207–38. 2. See La philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (Hachette, 1868). 3. ‘Dessin’ in Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire (Hachette, 1880). 4. Chipiez, Histoire des ordres grecs (end). 5. See La philosophie en France au XIXe siècle.

8 Mysteries: Fragment of a Study of the History of Religions A general belief in the most ancient times was that everything issued from a divine depth, an inexhaustible source of goodness. These depths occupied an immense subterranean region. This was the form adopted by the idea – in minds where imagination not reason predominated – that the principle from which everything derives goes beyond anything the understanding can grasp, an idea that came to be understood in a less material sense as the work of reflection refined minds. In Greek mythology, the sovereign of this great subterranean region bore the name Pluto, which derives from the noun plou/toj, meaning wealth; and on the most ancient monuments featuring him, he holds in one hand a horn overflowing with fruits, which also became the ordinary symbol of rivers, which everywhere bring fertility. Latin mythology spoke of the treasure of Orcus, Italy’s Pluto. In this way, in a poetic age, the belief was formed that in the invisible principle from which all visible things emanate, as Plato had it, there is to be found in its eminent state, as Descartes would later put it, everything that nature contains. This was a belief diametrically opposed to the theories that, abstracting from any transcendent origin, came subsequently to explain the world as a progress from nothingness to perfection. Thus in classical antiquity it was not thought that an absolute obscurity reigned in the great subterranean region. On the contrary, a special light was thought to be found there (sua sidera norunt),1 a light different to that of the day, but in which the latter had its source, the sun coming periodically to replenish itself from it. This is a doctrine taught explicitly by Egyptian mythology, and Greek and Latin mythologies bear some traces of it. According to Greek mythology, Night was the mother of the Graces. From the subterranean night sprang the stars, stars that at the time were not considered to be as distant as they are. Thus it was first by nights and moons that time was divided, and not by days and years. The Gauls were still doing this when the Romans knew them; the Hebrews still do it. The subterranean or lower, and even infernal (these words were synonymous) region was originally the domain of the gods; it was also that of souls. The gods enjoyed a felicity such that one of their most ancient attributes was to be happy,

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ma/karej; souls participated in this felicity. Returning to this happy place where it had originated, therefore, had to be the final destiny of humanity, the highest object of its desires, and such was the ultimate end at which religion everywhere aimed. From the gods were claimed all kinds of goods, but above all the supreme good of living a day of their life and of living it with them. All the practices that were believed best able to please the divinity were, therefore, related to a future existence. These practices also had to be kept more hidden than others. The gods would not appreciate having what concerned them most and touched them in the heart of their existence divulged. Among the ancients, with certain religious practices seeming to be more fitting than others for gaining the favour of the gods, those who claimed familiarity with these practices – often because they had been revealed to them or to their ancestors by the Gods – generally guarded the secret with care. But it was necessary to surround with the greatest obscurity the rites bearing the most direct relation to the divine night. The Great goddesses of Eleusis, spirits of the subterranean regions, Ceres or Mother-Earth, and Proserpine, who probably split off from her, were represented with torches in hand, as inhabitants of the nocturnal domain; and if in general religious ceremonies were practised at night, for those of the cult of Ceres and her daughter in Eleusis it was a particularly rigorous prescription. What was the significance and what was the supposed efficacy of the worship in general, and, more particularly, of the worship of the Great goddesses? Is it true, as a Latin poet said, and as many moderns have repeated, that religion is born from fear, and that the primary task of the worship was to placate naturally malevolent spirits by means of offerings? To support this view one could cite, apparently with good reason, the expressions so frequently employed by the ancients: i0la&skesqai tou\j qeou\j, placare deos, placate the gods. But, in truth, in paganism just as in Judaism, if one often attributed rage to a divinity that it was necessary to placate, the reason for this rage was thought to reside in his justice. With the Jews, who had a more lively consciousness than any other people of an original transgression, repeated subsequently in one generation after another, a transgression consisting in rising up against God or at least in wanting to become independent of him, a special rite expressed with a singular force the idea of the necessity of expiation: this consisted in charging an animal – considered in Judea, like everywhere else, as the instantiation of brutal sensuality – with the sins of the whole people, and to cast it out into the desert, as if delivered over to some vengeful spirit who resided there. As for the sacrifices that each could offer individually, the general expiation already having been assured, one called these, in contrast to the expiatory offerings, sacrifices of actions of grace made to the divine goodness, eucharistic or pacific sacrifices. (The word peace implied in the language of antiquity the idea of concord and happiness no less than that of rest; this is still the sense of the Christian phrase in pace.) In the sacrifices of peace and graces, the worshippers participated in what they



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offered by a divine concession, and thus became, by virtue of a new and superior benefaction of the divinity, his intimates. With the Greeks and Romans, after the preliminary rites, which were given over to the idea of a necessary expiation, the worship principally had what has been described as a Eucharistic character, which is to say that it was above all a celebration of divine gifts and, so to speak, a hymn in action. Pagan liturgy as a whole – however barbarous its forms may often have been, however much it was an admixture of disparate elements – was therefore, at bottom, something like a great concert of admiration and recognition. The form of worship that served to constitute the most intimate commerce with divinities from the other world, and which was therefore the most august of all, received in the most eminent sense the name teleth/, completion, which applied to every religious ceremony. This form of worship being also the most secret of all, was also given in the most eminent sense the name of mystery, musth/rion, from a word, mu/ein, which signifies to close one’s mouth, and to those who were granted access to it the name of mystae, mu/stai. (However, given that those received into the highest parts of the mysteries in which the gods showed themselves had taken from this the name of epoptae, e0po&ptai, from e0poptei/a, view or contemplation, the name of mystae was used in particular for those who were still only aspirants, just as in the Christian church the catechumens – those baptized or purified only – were distinguished from those admitted to the sacred table, called the faithful.) The Romans gave to the mysteries the name of initiations, initia, beginnings, a name indicating that it was a matter of a passage to a new life. The moment when, in the weaning of an infant, ‘one begins’, says Varro, ‘to make it eat, drink and sleep in a bed’ was already named thus. A slave, in Terence’s Phormion, complains of the expense that he is obliged to make when the infant of the house is being initiated. The same name was given, in the most eminent sense, to the mysteries of Ceres. She was the goddess who, by inventing agriculture and particularly the cultivation of wheat, had put an end to the savage life that previously was the lot of men, and had taught them what was called humanity. Humanity was much more than a new way of being nourished, even when added to this was the benefaction of Bacchus, which had consisted in giving as a beverage to men, instead of blood, wine, with which, on monuments, he even quenched the thirst of tigers. In founding the household by the stability that agriculture demands, Ceres had founded marriage, sacred tie of the family. Moreover, according to an old Latin poet, she founded cities that he calls ‘holy’. Holy, perhaps because the city was first, for each region, the sanctuary to which dispersed families came, elevating themselves above the exclusive worship of their particular spirits, to worship in common a higher spirit, who made hospitality a duty and who recommended the stranger to all, as his representative. It would seem that in the mysteries the benefaction of Ceres was celebrated, but also that the superior, supplementary benefaction serving as the introduction to

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divine life was celebrated even more. It was this that made people come to Eleusis, as Cicero says, from the ends of the earth. The ambition of the initiates was in no way limited to disarming the wrath of the gods; they wanted to become their friends, to live with them for some of their life, to be their companions and their intimates. This is why a banquet offered to the divinity was, so to speak, the body and substance of the Eleusinian mysteries, a banquet more solemn than the meals essential to all the other sacrifices that corresponded to the Hebrew sacrifices of peace, a banquet of a more Eucharistic nature than any other, and in which, with the divinity, his worshippers played a large role. In the principal ceremonies of the worship, which the Greeks called teletai\ or qusi/ai, the Romans sacra and sacrificia, the gods were offered the ingredients of a meal, vegetables in the most distant past, and then the flesh of different animals, together with bread, salt,2 wine mixed with honey water, then cakes (ferta) and fruits. During the banquets, the dishes were supplemented with anything serving to gladden the meal: songs, dances, dramatic representations recounting, in the most ancient times, in Greece or in Rome, the marvellous adventures of the gods and heroes. This tradition still persisted in the Middle Ages with the interludes or ‘entremets’ during great feasts. Nothing remains to us of the dogmatic discourses supposedly addressed to the initiates, and in which critics used to believe the essence of the mysteries to consist; a belief that was overturned by the learned author of Aglaophamus. But it is said that the initiates heard voices and musical instruments, that they watched marvellous spectacles, and that they were shown the actions of the gods. From these characteristics, it is easy to recognize a great banquet. On the other hand, as we have just seen, the initiates ultimately came to see the gods themselves; the gods, and that is to say the statues representing them, in which the gods were thought to be present. These statues – which were probably principally Ceres and Proserpine – had in their hands, according to the testimony of one author, silver torches. This is an image recalling what Athenaeus says of the feast of the wealthy Caranus. Evidently, everything did not occur in a kind of sacerdotal school, but rather in a festival hall, or rather in a sanctuary transformed into such a hall. Now, if in the earliest periods it was believed, as Ovid says, that in each family the Gods were present at mealtimes, then they must have been thought to be present at the feast of the initiates of Eleusis. It was possible to attend the meal, therefore, only if one had previously been made worthy, and that is to say purged of all stain. Consequently, before the banquet a bath was necessary, which was taken, in the most ancient times, in the sea (hence the traditional cry: a3lade mu/stai, to the sea the initiates!) or in the nearest river; and later in baths. One emerged from this bath to be anointed with perfumed oil and crowned with flowers. It is in this state that one took one’s place at the divine table.



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The mystery comprised, therefore, two phases, the first consisting in a purification (and this is why the mystae would sing ‘I have escaped the worst and found the best’), the second consisting in a banquet in which, after having offered to the gods samples of the most precious things owed to them, the mystae enjoyed these gifts with them so as, in the end, to share in their vision. The gatherings of the happy ones in the other world were often depicted as having the same form. This is particularly clear in the verses on the Elysian life by the old poets Musaeus and Eumolpus cited by Plato, in their depiction of the Catacombs where the just are sitting at a table laden with dishes, with the inscription Convivium piorum, and also in the sepulchral painting in the museum of Bologna where two spirits carry a dead person into a feasting hall, clearly to show that he will return there to be resuscitated and to take his place among the convivial company. This is, in the end, what is alluded to by the many bas-reliefs decorating tombs, in which the dead person is shown, often with divine attributes, half-reclining before a table laden with cakes and fruits. In addition to the sacred banquet, a third moment of the mystery can be glimpsed in rare and allusive, but sufficiently meaningful testimonies, a moment that had a still more narrow association with the divinity. The Egyptians hoped each to become by death Osiris, husbands of the great Isis, queen of the divine, infernal world. The Greeks treated their dead in the same way, those, at least, whom initiation had rendered worthy, as the husbands of Proserpine, identical at bottom with the sovereign of the world and certainly of the divine world. She was a goddess whose cult came perhaps from Asia, and that the Greeks called, with a name equivalent to that of the queen of the sky that she had borne in Asia, celestial Venus. Virgil still says in speaking of the one who did not receive the smile of his parents, and who was consequently not destined for supreme felicity: Nec deus hunc mensa dea nec dignata cubili est.3 The ultimate purpose of the mysteries, therefore, a purpose enveloped even more than all the rest in obscurity, was to be united, a union whose image was conjugal partnership, to eternal Beauty. Thus the name of fiancés, numfi/oi, was given to initiates. A degree of substantial union with the divinity was already, it can be said, the purpose of the sacred banquet. Throughout antiquity, but above all in the earliest periods, things, which one happily took to be more or less living, were related to gods or spirits constituting the ground of their existence. Wheat was Ceres herself, wine was Bacchus.4 As Vico has shown, this was the principle of ancient poetry, which animated, personified, divinized everything. Nothing was more natural therefore – when things were, in addition, solemnly consecrated such that a divine virtue descended into them – than to consider them as so many divinities. Whoever is nourished by meat offered to the idols, says Saint Paul, participates in the altar itself. And the altar was the sacred fire, of a

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divine origin, that consumed the offerings. Taking the consecrated bread and wine, therefore, was to nourish oneself with Ceres, to drink Bacchus. The sacred marriage, i9ero\j ga&moj, as the Greek used to say, promised to the mystae a still more profound union with the divinity, of a still higher order. Such was the highest part of the worship as it is appeared in paganism;5 it reappears as such, in its essential traits, in the Christian religion. In Christianity also, two sacraments (musth/ra in Greek) come to the fore: the sacrament of purification, which is Baptism, to which penitence was joined in the first centuries, and that of the sacred meal, which is the Eucharist; and, standing more in the background, in a half-light, the sacred nuptials can be glimpsed. Yet, in each of these three moments, the idea presiding in them is, so to speak, purified, sublimated and invested with a new power. In Christianity, even more than in Judaism, the awareness of an inner appetency for sin, consisting essentially in an affectation of independence with respect to God, has more force than in paganism. The appetency is considered to be rooted in sensibility. Consequently, the preliminary purification goes as far as annihilating the inferior element, the occasion and substance of sin. One leaves the baptismal water not only purified, but regenerated. The ancient theologians named baptism the sacrament of death, and the Eucharist the sacrament of life. In the Eucharist, the identity of the offering with the divinity to whom it is offered remains only as an idea barely signalled; this is the formal doctrine of the sacrament, in which are merged the expiation and reconciliation that Judaism separated, according to which the victim and the word of God, God himself, are one, and that by participating in his victim, the worshipper will participate in divinity itself. As for the third and supreme moment, the mystical nuptials, this remains in the theory that the Husband will be the one, true God, in the person of his Verb, and that in his marriage with humanity universal destiny will be accomplished. The idea of marriage and of its sanctity was of considerable importance in the Hebrew mind. One of their greatest sages says: ‘What has the Creator done since the creation? He conjugates marriages; sedet et connubial conjungit.’ Genesis has the Creator say after having created man: go forth and multiply. In this command, a great law finds expression: once arrived, thanks to nutrition, at its full height and perfection, every being, as Aristotle said, tends to obtain a sort of eternity by the indefinite reproduction of its existence. This is a law governing and explaining nature as a whole. The Hebrews had always thought that the two sexes originally formed but one and the same being, which, after having been divided, should find, in marriage, its original unity. This is, at least, the most probable meaning of the passage of Genesis dealing with the creation of man, a meaning attributed to the passage by the theology – often as profound as it is bizarre in its forms – that developed gradually, at a remove from the Scriptures, under the name of the tradition or Kabbala.



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The idea that all things have their models in divine properties is an idea that dominates what one could call Hebraic wisdom. Probably, therefore, the idea that in the divinity itself – which Descartes was later to call a cause of itself – there must be a sort of interior, perpetual production by which it constantly reconstituted its own perfection, and which was imitated by the phenomenon of natural reproduction, was a favourite idea of Israel. In the Kabbala, with its figurative language, one of the principal properties of the divinity, Beauty (Tiphereth in Hebrew) unfolds in another, the Kingdom (Malcuth) that provides, so to speak, the space for its expansion. And the first is related to the second as a father to his son, or a husband to his wife.6 More, the wife in both the Bible and for the Kabbalists is Israel, whose husband is Jehovah. When Israel returns to the idolatry from which Jehovah had saved her, the prophets describe her infidelity as adultery. The Kingdom is still called by the sages of the Kabbala the house of Israel and the assembly of Israel, the whole of the faithful being compared thus – as a wife often is – to a residence or temple of the husband. In a biblical book written at a time when these ancient ideas were beginning to gain a more philosophical form, the Creator is represented as having given birth to knowledge, with which he goes on to make and order all his creatures. It is his daughter, who plays in front of him, says the text, and who is at the same time his wife. Similar ideas are to be found in Saint Paul, who was well versed in the whole of Judaic theology, and perhaps familiar with the Kabbala; they are to be found in what he says of the conjugal union of Jesus Christ with his Church, a union that he names a great mystery. In the Gospels themselves, Jesus is described as the husband whose arrival will bring an end to times of struggle and pain, and inaugurate joy. From this perspective, it seems more than probable that the sacrament or mystery by which the path leading to God apparently came to its end was, in Christianity just as in the religion of Eleusis and Athens, only an introduction to a higher mystery, an ultimate one, that was the marriage of humanity with divinity. The considerable difference between these two rituals, though so similar in their parts, should not be forgotten. Paganism, with its division of the divine essence among the properties of this essence, a division constituting polytheism, promised to the heroine a divine husband, to, above all, the hero a divine wife, the Great goddess, queen of the world. Christianity, neglecting these distinctions, promised only Christ as a husband for the congregation of the faithful as a whole, to the Church, each individual having to find in it, perhaps, his own particular destiny. In this way, the idea of a final reunion with the divinity is purged of all inferior elements and elevated to a higher degree of spiritual purity. At the same time, if one reflects on the conceptions that have so much importance in Philo of Alexandria’s theology, which was close in many ways to that of the Kabbalists, and whose echoes are easy to record in Paul’s letters and perhaps even in the Gospels, according to which the highest of the divine properties, the primary

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sources of all things, is what characterizes feminine nature in particular, namely gentleness; and if, on the other hand, it is remembered that the form in which the Holy Spirit, who is to reveal all truth, appears in the Gospels is that of a dove, the emblem of conjugal fidelity, as well as of tenderness – the dove, in the figure of which all Syria, within which Palestine lay, and also Greece adored the goddess who governed the world by love, the wife reserved in the future life for the hero –, then there might be some justification in concluding that, in the end, it was in an intimate union with a divine essence whose most perfect image was woman that the most innermost Christian doctrine tended to place the highest destiny of humanity and the ultimate end to which the mysteries led it. One of the Greek fathers said of the descent of the Verb into the world through the incarnation: it was feminized, e0qhlu/nqh.7 In short, the Gospels allow us to glimpse through certain veils, but to glimpse nevertheless, an intimate union with the divine essence as the consummation of religion, and it is in this that a dream of both paganism and Judaism, opposed in so many other respects, will be realized. And it is not easy to imagine either a doctrine or a liturgy essentially different from the doctrine and liturgy in the religions we have just examined. For the system of ideas and practices that constituted the basis of both dogma and worship in paganism, in Judaism and then in Christianity, and then everywhere else, is something universal and eternal. These ideas and practices correspond point by point to the successive phases of life from its beginning to the height of its perfection. These differences can ultimately be reduced to different degrees of purity and clarity, paganism and Judaism offering, so to speak, the sketches whose supreme realization is announced by Christianity in the coming reign of pure Spirit. If this reign is to come – the reign of a teaching without reticence or anything merely figurative, which was thought to have been attained, particularly in the thirteenth century, in the Middle Ages, whose philosophy and theology have worked in so many ways to hasten its advent – what will perhaps subsist in it of what the Christian Church called long ago ‘the discipline of the secret’ will be the idea that, from the very beginning, was its ground: the first principle, the divine principle, so manifest in the things that are but sensory expressions of its powers, is in its essence of a depth (the immensity of which Descartes so often speaks) that cannot be grasped by the human faculty named the understanding (which can grasp with the help of the imagination and the senses only what is limited), a depth of luminous shadows such as ancient poetry spoke of it, and which only what is the most removed from any materiality in reason and the heart can penetrate.



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Notes 1. [Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 641: ‘They have their sun and their stars’.] 2. We should note here in passing that bread, necessary accompaniment of everything else, often wholly replaced it in liturgical language; the same sometimes applied to salt, particularly in the ceremonial of contracts. This simplification of primitive symbols is a general law. 3. [Virgil, Bucolics, IV, 63: ‘He who has not smiled at his parents has hardly been judged worthy of sharing the table of a god, or the bed of a goddess.’] 4. Varro, De lingua Latina, 6: ‘Bachus pro ipso vino poni consuevit’ [‘One became used to taking Bacchus for wine itself ’]. In Ovid, Metamorphoseon libri, VII, 104, it is Vulcan for fire. 5. In Epicurean epitaphs, the two final degrees of the initiations become edere, bibere, ludere. 6. In Greek mythology, Jupiter engenders Prosperpine, and then from her Iacchus. 7. [Janicaud: See Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur, 37: ‘Having loved, the Father feminized himself ’: a)gaph&saj o9 path\r e0qhlu/nqh.]

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9 Pascal’s Philosophy It has been argued, with reference to particular passages of Pascal’s Pensées, an apology for Christianity that he left only in rough outline, that in sacrificing reason for faith he denied the possibility of any philosophy. I propose to show, not, as others seem to me to have already shown successfully, that Pascal was not a sceptic, but that in his Pensées is to be found, if not a system comparable in its extension and detail to those of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche or Leibniz, then at least ideas constituting the principles of a veritable philosophy. I propose to show also that these ideas are in a perfect accord with Pascal’s beliefs, and that there is no reason to be surprised by this, for there are none more suitable to harmonize and even to unify intimately, in what is most elevated within them, Christianity and philosophy. In order to illuminate the perspective from which Pascal approaches matters, a brief historical introduction is necessary.

I Philosophy has always aspired to penetrate everything and to encompass everything. Instead of remaining, like the different particular sciences, with the detail of particular appearances, it aims to get to the bottom of all things, to arrive at the primary causes. Not content with explanations of particular ways of being, it seeks, for all beings, what constitutes their very being and grounds them. Those who founded philosophy aimed to explain everything by means of some physical substance – water, air or fire – which adopted all the different forms. Others arrived who held that, in order to ground science, it was necessary to posit principles higher than the sphere of the senses and even of the imagination, principles known by intelligence alone. The Pythagoreans and the Platonists were struck, moreover, by everything that could be explained in nature by the then nascent mathematics, in which as Descartes put it, the understanding is mixed with the imagination, which still belongs to the world of the senses. They held that the ultimate ground of things resides in numbers and in unity to which they can be reduced; in numbers

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or in ideas, of a similar nature, reducible to the same principle, through which the understanding – not without the help of the imagination – grasps and orders objects. The Pythagoreans and Platonists went from materiality, with which their predecessors (who, in truth, did not fail to mix into it a principle of order and union) had apparently contented themselves, to an immaterial world, but one wholly made up of empty contours, a world of abstraction, without anything substantial or vital. How to find here something similar to the god imagined by the Pythagoreans, whose breath penetrated everything, maintaining, as they said, universal existence? The Greeks seemed to have always believed that the barbarians, with a less refined mind than theirs, had a more profound sense for principles. They related the origin of science and wisdom to a Thracian mountain dweller, a priest inspired by a god. One of Plato’s pupils, whose birthplace was not far from the lands where the fable placed Orpheus, and who was going to educate the future king of Macedonia, was less disposed than his peers to content himself with Hellenic subtleties, studying closely nature as well as humanity, rather than mathematics. It seemed to him, seeing that everything in nature was movement, that the essence of things had to be energy, from which movement followed, and that this was also the good for which everything was avid. At the summit of the universe exists an absolute energy, possessing its own end and its own principle, a pure intelligence eternally awake in the active intuition [vive intuition] of itself – such was the first cause, or God, from which the world was suspended, a world that always aspires to its perfection. Beneath, at all the levels of nature, exist energies that are increasingly incomplete and relative; energy declining by degrees, to the point of the state of mere potency without action, of inert virtuality to which what is called matter, in opposition to the forms it adopts, can be reduced. Valuing so highly the energy in the universe, Aristotle was also able to appreciate in man the freedom of will, which the partisans of numbers and ideas had not emphasized. Even in the passions, in which the Pythagoreans and Platonists had seen nothing unopposed to the soul’s tranquillity that they held to be perfection and happiness, he was able to recognize a base of activity through which they gave substance to virtue. Therefore, although the Pythagoreans and Platonists were right to seek principles beyond the horizon of nature, within which their predecessors had almost entirely confined themselves, they were wrong to stop halfway along the path that they had opened. They thought they had reached first causes; but they remained with things of a second order, still participating in inert and passive materiality. They thought they had lifted themselves out of the realm of the senses into that in which pure intelligence shines: they remained in an intermediate region in which reasoning works on the data of sensibility and imagination. Leibniz said: the principles of mathematics and those of materialism are the same. They are the same, as are those of an idealism searching for the grounds of things in general notions, to which the



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understanding applies itself, not without the support of the imagination; the more these notions are general, being abstracted from realities, from individual things, the more they are removed from real existence; and thereby – as Cesalpini, the great Aristotelian of the sixteenth century says – while aiming by increasing degrees of generalization to advance more and more into being, we end up with less and less. In attempting to move away from materialism, we thus fall back into nihilism, to which, analysed rigorously, it can be reduced. Whence derives the illusion that makes us oblivious to the goal actually pursued, and to go down when the aim is to go up? It derives from the understanding’s assimilation of real and natural unity, which is given to realities by the action through which they exist, with the false and artificial unity with which, in forming its ideas, the understanding imitates the former. This false unity is that of genera and species, brought together, in the Schools, under the heading of universals. Thus the understanding – in taking, as Descartes explains, its own compositions to be simple – considers its own creations, the signs of what it has abstracted from things, also to be things, without noticing that the more that it puts what belongs to it in them, the more it diminishes their reality, in such a way that under the most perfect generalization lies the most perfect void. The logical world – such as it is constituted in, for example, Hegel’s idealism – offers, one could say, an inverted image of the real world. Besides, Hegel himself was conscious of this, since the basis on which he erected his system consists of the identity of pure being, without anything else, with pure nothing. The first reason for the error that Aristotle comes to rectify, in founding metaphysics, is that being, which is what has to be accounted for, was previously held to be merely a confused idea, while what exists only in a derived and improper sense was taken to be veritably existent. What truly exists is what exists by itself; this is what is called substance; the accidents of a substance, attributes that in language adjectives express, are only in it, and outside of it do not exist, at least not beyond ideas and words. Consequently, the primary necessity in the search for first principles is that of distinguishing the genera of being or categories. The first result of this work is the separation of the principal category, namely substances, beings properly so called, from the secondary categories containing simple attributes or accidents. This separation immediately shows how great was the error of those who sought in the category of quantity, represented by numbers, an explanation of being. What caused this error was another illusion in thinking, one natural to it, and which arises from its need, given the condition in which we find ourselves, to be supplemented by the imagination, which is very close to the senses and the origin of quantity. Following an important remark of a French philosopher from the beginning of this century, we make of a quality a distinct and precise notion, thus giving rise to a science, only to the extent that we translate it into extension and number. The barometer and the thermometer, in which the space filled by a liquid

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allows us to measure the weight of the air and heat, offer examples of this. There is here a strong inclination to take, as materialism does, for the things themselves, for the powers and indivisible forces, the quantities corresponding to them and by which one reckons with them. This is the project of materialism, which reduces things to their geometric and mechanical conditions, that is, to their imaginable parts. Let us remark in passing that it is because Kant believed it impossible, after Hume and Locke, to grasp anything beyond the field of the imagination, and because he conceived substance, which metaphysics addresses as a substrate of sensible appearances, as invisible and inaccessible under these appearances, though of a similar nature to them (this is what he calls the ‘thing in itself ’), that metaphysics seemed impossible to him, and that he considered being as an object not of knowledge, but only of belief. Descartes, however, had shown that the soul had a consciousness of itself which attained not only its modes – as Kant has it, and as the Scottish school and those following it have also held – but rather its essence; a consciousness that constituted the intellectual intuition that Kant, after his precursors, misrecognized. But to reinforce, on this unshakeable base, the doctrine of pure intellect against the assaults of the doctrine of the senses and the imagination, it was necessary that in deepening further the principle posed by Aristotle one came to understand fully that substance and energy are the same thing, and that in action being itself shows itself to the mind reflecting on itself. Whatever the case may be, one should not, as Pythagoreanism and Platonism tended to do, confuse being, the wholly intelligible object of pure intuition, with quantity, by means of which we always attempt to imagine it. On the contrary, they must be profoundly separated: being as energy, action, that is, as soul; and quantity which, as Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and many others saw, is but the inert matter constituting body. The secondary categories should not be considered, beneath the principal category, as all on the same level. As was shown by Aristotle, the Stoics and also the Neoplatonists, who were profoundly occupied with the classification of the forms of being, a being and its nature, expressed by its qualities, are almost the same thing; something existent being an energy that makes itself knowable by its specific quality. Quantity, in contrast, ordinarily determined by a more or less, approximates – as Leibniz remarks – to a simple relation that, though grounded in reality, is genuinely real only through the comparison undertaken by the understanding and through the sign by which the understanding presents it. Thus quality is very close to being, quantity is distant from it. Establishing this is a primary and decisive step by and for philosophy. A second, no less important step is, following the founder of the theory of categories, that of distinguishing in the principal category what is still more primordial from what is secondary. This consists, as I have just indicated, in being in the highest sense, so to speak; it is the being that acts in such a way that its existence



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is wholly action, that is, intelligence; next comes that which is merely disposed to act, and, in third place, that which only has the capacity for action. To which one must add, with Leibniz, that there is no longer anything real here; for a bare power without any effort or beginning of action is nothing real; it is the idea that one has of a primary matter, the imaginary term to which the diminution of activity, step by step, degradation by degradation, tends. Being, therefore, which fills the highest of the categories, falls in a certain sense, in its inferior aspect – and at the same time by quality, from which it is not really separable – into inert and passive materiality. Such is the doctrine forming the basis of Aristotle’s metaphysics, a doctrine according to which perfect or absolute existence, the supreme reality on which everything in existence depends, consists in a maximum of action, and that is to say, in thought, simple and unified, knowing and possessing itself. In the Middle Ages, in the solitude of the cloisters and the schools attached to them, far from nature and society, one must have been immediately gripped by, if not by geometry and arithmetic, which were used little, then at least by logical abstractions. The view of those called the ‘realists’, not because they remained with true realities, but on the contrary because they posited general notions as realities, with which are woven the spiders’ webs of which Bacon speaks, predominated for a long time. To make real in this way abstractions whose only consistency derives from the signs summarizing them is, says Leibniz, to take the straw of words for the grain of things. Nominalism – the more profound sect, in Leibniz’s opinion – came later, the nominalism teaching that the reality of universals can be reduced to the words in which the understanding incorporates them. However, in going beyond any correct measure of truth, nominalism prepared for a new period that would, returning to the tradition of antiquity, regain contact with the nature and superior substance that is spirit. In this epoch, and by virtue of a new flowering of mathematics, which, at least, served to explain partially the physical world, philosophy understands all the more what is lacking in mathematical formula and those of logic to account fully for things, and it seeks once again, by metaphysics, the realities sufficient for this. Descartes, by untangling the opposed elements that were confused in the Middle Ages by means of vague generalities, distinguishing more sharply body and soul, matter and spirit, came to establish a system with which he claimed to have broken entirely with the errors of the past. However, distinguishing intelligence and will, as he did, in the very unity of spirit, as being in a relation of passivity to activity, and attributing superiority to the eminently active element of spiritual nature was to concur with the true peripatetic philosophy, if not with the one that wanted to continue it. The whole philosophy of the author of the Pensées is to be found in an embryonic state in this idea.

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II After having written in one of his responses to Clark: ‘I do not think that it is right to say that the mathematical principles of philosophy are opposed to those of the materialists; on the contrary, they are the same’, Leibniz added: ‘it is not the mathematical principles, but metaphysical principles that should be opposed to those of the materialists.’ And by metaphysical principles, he understood those relating to the nature of souls and God, objects not, like mathematical things, of the imagination, but of the understanding alone. Descartes, before Leibniz, opposed imaginable things to intelligible things, and made of the latter the sole object of metaphysics. Pascal opposes to mathematical objects other, quite different objects. He does not collect them under a single heading, and limits himself to enumerating and depicting them, but it is easy to recognize in them what he could have called, if it had been the language of his time, things of an aesthetic and moral nature; and at the same time he describes precisely the faculties of mind to which these two sorts of object are respectively related. No other philosopher, in fact, has had a sharper awareness of the difference of the two orders of things and faculties whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit; no other has had such a true and lively feeling for the special nature of the two different orders, and has drawn out so well the consequences of this distinction. Pascal, son of a skilful geometer and surrounded in his childhood by scholars of the same stamp, began with geometry. He was much concerned with physics, and he began thus to move from abstractions to reality. At this point, he was still studying things and not yet the superior reality that is mind. The relations that he had with some members of high society introduced him into the life of the court – such an agitated life, a tempestuous life, as he described it – where he came to learn the secret motives, amidst all the movements to which they give themselves over, obeyed by men. Frequenting highly cultured women must have helped greatly to refine his rare intelligence, and a love worthy of him seemed to take hold of his heart; the Discourse, discovered by Cousin, on the Passion of Love bears witness to this. In the end, the final years of his brief existence belonged to religion, and, after having employed, in the Provinciales, all the resources of the warmest eloquence and the most complete art in order to disengage religion from interpretations accommodating it to worldly life, he ended up by retiring in penitence, wholly given over to God, alone with the infinite and absolute. To these four phases of his career correspond four degrees by which his thinking rose, passing gradually from dead things to the first principle, source of all life, which is life itself. There are, Pascal says, two classes dividing quite different things. The first are figures and numbers, objects that are very simple and yet without common usage, in



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such a way that it is easy to understand them but difficult ‘to turn towards them in order to contemplate them’. Pascal thus names them objects abstracted from reality, which is the only customary and common object. Their properties, as he adds, depending on a few principles, are obviously interconnected and in order to know them the mind goes from one to the other by means of an uninterrupted deduction. This is difficult for lively minds carried quickly to the extremities and content to grasp their relations straight away. We should add here that, like Descartes, Pascal considers mathematical objects to be objects of the understanding unified and merged with the imagination. Vastly different is Kant’s theory, according to which the properties of extension and number are not known by judgements of a logical or rational nature, but by the operations of an inner imagination, one prior to sensory experience and which imposes its laws on the latter, but which is no closer to the senses than it is to pure thought. In his view, moreover, real knowledge is entirely composed of this sort of judgement. Such was not Descartes’s view, for whom every science derived from the understanding, and for whom mathematical perfection consisted in freeing itself as much as possible from the conditions of the imagination, and thus to use reason as much as possible; and this is what he wanted to do when, in his Geometry, he transformed extension into number, geometry into algebra. For Descartes, in studying geometrically the properties of extension, the understanding only applied principles deriving from a higher source to the objects of the imagination. Pascal and, later, Leibniz shared this view. Already in physics, one has to deal with realities. Its phenomena depend on a great number of different principles, which are difficult to grasp; one has to disentangle them from each other, and to draw out the exact consequences of each. It is no longer a matter here of what one could call, following Pascal, gross or crude principles, and of rigid deductions; instead of the geometric mind [l’esprit de géometrie], intuitive mind [l’esprit de finesse] is required. Intuitive mind is necessary a fortiori when it is no longer a question, as in physics, of sensible qualities, but rather, as in the social world, of realities more disengaged from crude materiality, of moral qualities, these qualities being nothing less than those proper to minds. This is what Pascal learnt to master in frequenting refined and cultured people, such as the Chevalier de Méré and his friend Miton, who introduced him, when he was still full of the mathematical and physical sciences, to the moving variety of social affairs, entertainments and conversations, and even to the games in which everything depends on chance calculated by probabilities rather than inflexible certitudes, but by probabilities that – though they have their own rules, which Méré led Pascal to examine and discover – are no less difficult to discern and foresee. In the social world, where at least the appearance of sympathy is necessary, it is appropriate to efface in the face of others one’s own individuality. Miton was particularly consummate in this. And the court generally excelled in it, where in manners,

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if not always in feelings and action, the tradition of this ancient disinterest, which was or ought to have been nobility itself, lived on. Worldly life, in the most elevated circles, was thus something like a preparation for love. In love, at least in the love – true love, in Pascal’s eyes – that is, as he puts it, ‘a thoughtful attachment’, subtle intuition is necessary more than anywhere else. In relation to love, Pascal came to attribute suppleness also to this intuitive mind. The object of love is, indeed, beauty, higher than any other object, and which, though it manifests itself in bodies, is no less, as a great painter and contemporary of Pascal said, of an incorporeal essence. Cicero had already said: ‘The shapes of the soul are more beautiful than those of the body.’ And Cicero was here as elsewhere interpreting the Greeks. If in the moral world in general, things are not crudely separated as they are in physics, but remain with each other and even interpenetrate (there is no idea, Plotinus said, in which all other ideas are not present), if each detail within it is impregnated with the whole, then it is above all in beautiful objects, in which there is no part that is not involved in the whole, that everything has value by accord and conformity. Here, more than anywhere else, in order to understand the whole, one has to come and go from one extremity to another, without stopping, above all from sensory effects to their intelligible principle, which requires a constant to and fro, a rapid back and forth, and consequently a perfect suppleness. This is what Pascal announces in this sentence from his Discourse on the Passion of Love: ‘There are two types of mind: the geometrical and what might be called the intuitive. The first arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with great flexibility and bears on the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves at one and the same time. When we have both kinds of mind combined (this was precisely Pascal’s virtue), how much pleasure is given by love! For we possess at the same time the strength and the flexibility of mind essentially necessary for the eloquence of two persons.’ What if Pascal had considered what constitutes the soul of beauty, and which, consequently, is the true cause of love, namely grace? Grace, which is all suppleness and flexibility, and thus as different as it could be from geometrical rigidity. Then, above all, to define the mind capable of understanding it, he would have noticed that one of its essential characteristics is the infinite capacity to undulate in every direction without effort, and to be shaped in myriad ways by the folds and unfolds offered by the sinuosity of living things (serpeggiamento), with which Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Correggio occupied themselves so much and that they knew how to depict so well. Another perfection that Pascal attributes to his ‘intuitive mind’ is that of seeing things ‘in one glance’. Nothing is more opposed to the deductive procedure of the geometrical mind. But it is so much of a perfection that the geometer himself must always attempt to approximate to it. For Descartes, that we need memory in order to grasp relations, after having successively examined their elements, was an imperfection of our spirit, a consequence of its commerce with time. The sequence of



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deductions only sought to join the principles with their consequences. To lead the understanding to the clear perception of their union, it was necessary to cover the series of consequences more and more quickly, to the point that one came to collect in a moment’s apprehension the beginning and the end. What is more, Descartes, though Aristotle preceded him in this, defines geometry as a science not only of measure, but of order. In reasoning in general, one unites ideas all contained in each other by an idea of average capacity: in mathematics, in which exact measures are sought, this measure is obtained by the comparison of two terms to a third taken to be a mean, which gives rise to the constitution of a proportion. Measure and proportionality are the same thing. But there are terms of such a sort that, put into order, their relation can be grasped in an instant. This is what method aims at. Its ultimate objective is, according to Descartes, to bring back the questions of measure and proportion to simple questions of order, and thus to lead from deduction, required by the conditions of division and succession constituting materiality, to the simplicity of intuition. How can we attain this goal and convert the problem of measure into a simple problem of order? By putting the objects into a series or line (this is the sense of the word order) in which there is a first, second and so on, and in which the resemblance of the first to the second can be seen in an instant. And finally the resemblance is grounded by the identity of a common essence more or less mixed with accidents. Indeed, there is in each genre of things, says Descartes, a simple or absolute nature that is the principle by which the relative ones are to be explained. The art is to discover it and show how the rest relate to it. And this is what one does in classifying things according to the order in which the absolute burdens itself with accessories that adulterate it. Leibniz remarked somewhere that things can be compared either because the one contains the other, and this is to compare them by their quantity, or because the one resembles the other, and this is to compare them by their qualities. To reduce a question of measure to a question of order or arrangement is therefore, from the point of view of quantity, to pass to that of quality, it is to pass from an inferior genus, where deduction is the thing, to a superior genus, where there is only intuition. This, says Descartes, is the secret of the art, of which, it should be noted, the Discourse on Method, a popular and basic presentation of his thinking, says nothing, but which the Rules for the Direction of the Mind that must belong to his final years had as a task to reveal, but which, unfortunately, he did not finish. Nothing proves that Pascal knew of this treatise. But his ideas about the capacity that intuitive mind has to see ‘in one glance’ proceeds from the same conception that grounds the posthumous work of Descartes, and they have the same goal. And it is quite possible, if he did not know this work, that these ideas arose in conversations with Descartes, conversations in which geometry and method must often have been discussed. Besides, if Descartes, in formulating the principles contained in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, applies

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them to mathematical examples, they are no less, according to him, applicable to any type of subject. And, indeed, a profound observer, Flourens, formulated a quite similar thought on the experimental method to the general maxim proposed by the author of Geometry: ‘The whole art of experiment is to discover the simple facts.’ Besides, the simple natures to which Descartes wants to lead method back are, regardless of their nature, facts. The simplicity to which he advises us to return is not an apparent simplicity, either of material elements, in which the true principle is in a kind of inferior state of dilution and dispersion among quantity, or of abstract notions, which are, as he explained, collective representations, but the real simplicity of an absolute exempt from the restrictions that relative things impose on it. It has always been thought possible to approach the divinity through initiations of a dual nature, the first level of which involved purging oneself of evil, while in the second the good was attained and the soul participated in it. It can be said that method, such as Descartes describes it, offers two analogous degrees: in the first, we gradually eradicate all the various accessories that always veil the principle; and in the second, we grasp the principle as the absolute enveloped by all relative things, and which is the only explanation of what is essential to the latter. Now, given that the veritable principle is enveloped by everything, since everything, says Plato, depends on the highest ideas; and since all ideas resolve themselves, says Leibniz, into the attributes of God; and since the attributes of God are, above all, intelligence and will, that is to say the powers of the mind; and since it is in the things of an aesthetic and moral order that this principle becomes apparent; and since, finally, the only perfect simplicity is the one that it possesses, it is easy to understand why it is above all in the things of an aesthetic and moral order that we see, according to Pascal’s favourite expression, at one glance. However, Leibniz said: ‘Even the pleasures of sense are reducible to intellectual pleasures, known confusedly. Music charms us, although its beauty consists only in the agreement of numbers and in the counting, which we do not perceive but which the soul nevertheless continues to carry out, of the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies which coincide at certain intervals. The pleasures which the eye finds in proportions are of the same nature, and those caused by other senses amount to something similar, although we may not be able to explain them so distinctly.’ And similarly, after having remarked that, by intuitive mind, we see things in an instant, at a glance, and not by a development of reasoning, Pascal says: ‘It is not that the mind does not do it, but it does it tacitly, naturally and without any art.’ Is it the case, then, that the instantaneous glance that Pascal opposes to calculation is reducible, when examined closely, to a rapid condensation of unnoticed calculations? Is it the case that the whole of beauty is reducible to arithmetical combinations? It is hardly evident that there is anything truly aesthetic in purely numerical combinations. Beauty rather escapes all arithmetic as well as all geometry. Its sphere is much higher. And if it consisted only in relations of quantity, as would



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a fortiori the qualities of a less elevated order, what would become of the theory of Leibniz himself on the radical difference of quantity and quality? What would become of the difference established by Pascal between the geometric mind and another sort of mind wholly opposed to it? One of Leibniz’s expressions in the above passage offers a means to solve the difficulty. It is not in numbers themselves that he has beauty consist, but in the ‘agreement of numbers’. We know that agreement, in the whole of his philosophy, in which it is the supreme principle, is something quite different to mathematical relations: it is a special harmony of qualities, a world in which, as we have seen, there prevails a principle of similitude and not of volume. He probably supposed, and we can suppose with him, that in certain encounters with numbers we perceive indefinable harmonies, which do not belong to arithmetic, and which one grasps all at once, however multiple and successive their medium may be, and which agree. And why do they agree for us? Perhaps because they offer images, resemblances of intelligible perfections that are those of the mind. Such is the thought that seems to be contained in this sentence written by Leonardo da Vinci: ‘It is not the proportions that constitute beauty, but a quality of the proportions’, particularly if one relates it to this other sentence written by him: ‘Painting has the goal of representing the soul.’ This must have been what Pascal was thinking of also. Perhaps he thought – and with him Descartes and Leibniz – that often, in the exercise of our faculties, what seems to be a matter of instantaneity is but movement, what seems to be intuition is but promptitude of reasoning. It is no less true that in our perception of things of an intellectual and moral order in particular, the union of parts in wholes, of details in ensembles, can be only the application of a primordial simplicity to a multiplicity. The unity of the army, as Aristotle said at the end of his Metaphysics, derives from the simplicity of the leader. We can add that, dominating thus the successive movement that brings things closer to it, without descending from its height into the region of time that imagination and reasoning run through, thought or pure intellection considers them, in Spinoza’s expression, under a form of eternity. What Pascal often calls intuitive mind, he often calls feeling; a term to which it would be wrong to attach an idea of pure passivity, for here it designates an operation, an act of mind and its most veritable action. Thus Pascal says that feeling depends on a judgement, which he opposes to mind. And, in the end, to the idea of judgement he joins that of rule. In a paragraph of the Pensées, at the head of which he wrote the title: ‘Geometry, intuition [finesse]’, he expresses himself with his usual vivacity: ‘True eloquence mocks eloquence, true morality mocks morality. In other words, the morality of judgement mocks the morality of mind, which is without rules. For judgement is that to which feeling belongs, just as knowledge belongs to mind. Intuition belongs to judgement, geometry to mind.’ From this passage it more distinctly emerges that the sciences generally depend on nothing other than geometric mind, whereas the arts, of which eloquence is

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here an example, depend on intuitive mind; that to deal geometrically with art and morality, in the same way as the sciences, is to pervert them; that intuitive mind is, in opposition to reasoning or deductive mind, a faculty of immediate appreciation to which the name of judgement is particularly fitting; finally, that morality and the art of judgement have their rules, while morality and the art of the mind have none. Leibniz, who would have liked to have geometrical demonstrations in morality, was of a slightly different view. But it can be said that on this crucial point he was less constant than Pascal in relation to what their principles had in common, less faithful to the distinction that he established, like Pascal, between the geometrical order and the moral and aesthetic order. This is to say that he did not have as sharp an awareness of what in the moral and aesthetic order, and, consequently, in metaphysics, is different and superior to the other order. More intellectualist, if this term is permitted, he did not understand the will in the same way, and did not value it to the same degree. This is perhaps what explains why he did not succeed or persevere in his enterprise of composing a philosophical language in which ideas of all kinds would be represented by signs as the elements of calculation. Certainly, Leibniz had a higher sense of calculation in mind, one that he called philosophical. But, whatever this calculation may have been exactly, given that it would always require rationally definable elements, instituting it was not something for which the nature of the things to which intuitive mind is related – these perfectly intelligible things that Leibniz himself often proclaimed to be quite different to mathematical and material things – gave us much hope of success. Do we have to conclude from what Pascal says that in his opinion true morality has no principles at all? On the contrary, his words indicate that in his view the latter, and the latter alone, has rules. And evidently the same applies to true eloquence, which he brings together with true morality and even, more generally, with true art. What is, then, the rule in the morality of judgement, true morality? Pascal did not explicitly elucidate this. But he discussed in some detail the rule in art. And, since he assimilates true morality and true art as both falling under judgement, it is possible to draw what he thought about the rule in morality from what he said about the rule in art. For Pascal, the perfection of art resides in its being natural: the great rule amounts to never departing from this naturalness. The authors of whom he disapproves the most are those who burden the object they represent with foreign ornaments as a result of which it can barely be recognized. From poetry, from eloquence, he asks for naïve images of what is. ‘Charm is necessary’ for ‘charm is the very object of poetry’ – ‘but the charm has to be taken from what is real.’ Thus we are charmed when in a work, ‘thinking that we would find an author, we find a man’; a man, i.e. someone who has felt what he wants to depict, and who, consequently, depicts it truthfully. It would be wrong to conclude from these words that Pascal ought to be placed among those for whom the whole of art would consist in the materially exact



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representation of any object. Such a representation would offer little charm. ‘What vanity,’ cries Pascal, in one of the passages where he points out difficulties without committing himself to solving them, ‘what vanity there is in painting that gains admiration by resembling the things whose originals we admire not at all!’ But the point is, independently of the question of what a thing is that pleases by itself, that by imitation – which is, as we saw above, and as we will see shortly, a great secret of nature according to Pascal himself – the painter reveals in these unadmired originals something that merits our attention. Rembrandt makes us see, in a composition featuring the most common objects, what the poet calls dias luminis auras. And this is why Boileau was able to say: There is hardly an odious monster Which imitated by art cannot please the eyes;

– by art, and not by an artifice of servile reproduction. If it were solely a matter of the senses, without anything of the mind, there would be no ‘man’ to be found in an ‘author’, but an ‘animal’, and there would be no reason to be ‘charmed’. Pascal understands the nature that art has the purpose of representing as a superior nature, of which what is commonly taken to be real nature is but an alteration; as a primitive, original nature that art has the purpose, like philosophy, of restoring. And the ground of this primitive nature of which everything in this world is a more or less changed and distorted image, is the soul in its essential perfection. This is why, once again, Leonardo da Vinci could say that the goal of painting is to represent the soul. Everything in the universe is imitation: this is one of Pascal’s remarks. ‘Nature imitates herself. A seed sown in good ground brings forth fruit. A principle, instilled into a good mind, brings forth fruit. Numbers imitate space, which is of a different nature. All is made by the same master, root, branches, and fruits; principles and consequences.’ The importance that Pascal accorded to the idea of imitation will be better understood in recalling that his theory of conical sections, a work of his youth, admired by Descartes and Leibniz, which must have contained in embryonic form his whole way of understanding mathematics, seems to have been founded on the idea, advanced by the great geometer Desargues, that the properties of a complicated figure can be considered as the modifications and resemblances of a more simple one; that, for example, the conical section that is an ellipse is only a perspective on the circle that is the basis of the cone; a theory according to which the secret of mathematics would be – as is that of nature, in the way that Aristotle, Goethe, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire understood it – metamorphosis; a theory of universal similitude, having for its basis an idea of radical identity. A single invariable principle, as Leibniz said, with a negative element of infinite variation. This is what he wanted to represent with a medal on which was the sun shining on clouds, with the exergue: Sufficit unum.

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In more than one passage, Pascal sketched out this idea, already indicated by Plato, that everywhere in the universe the inferior is an image of the superior. ‘Nature is a figure of grace; grace itself is a figure of glory.’ Art was therefore, for Pascal, imitation, but imitation of a model that is, at bottom, supernatural. This must have also been his thinking with regards to morality. True morality was not a deduction from abstract maxims; it was conformity to a sovereignly real model, one sovereignly alive, and this model was God. Such was the rule without which the morality of mind would lose itself in errors mocked by the morality of judgement. Plato had said: resemble God; the Gospels: be perfect, like your Father is perfect. Now what, according to Pascal, is the nature of this model, so real and so different to a number or idea, in which the rule applied by judgement is located? This is indicated by another idea with which he more than once replaces, in associating it to that of instinct, the idea of intuition and suppleness, namely the idea of the ‘heart’. ‘We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The Pyrrhonians, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose … And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart [connaissances du coeur], and must base on them every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of the three-dimensional nature of space, and of the infinity of number, and reason then shows that there are two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are felt, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason a feeling for all demonstrated propositions before accepting them. This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us. Would to God, on the contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and feeling! But nature has refused us this boon.’ Without pausing to remark that this passage is enough to overturn everything written to demonstrate the supposed Pyrrhonism of its author, and his supposed disdain for any intelligence, we should just draw from it the conclusion that, if Pascal relates knowledge of principles in general back to the heart, this is because the first principles, on which everything depends, seem to him to reside in what constitute the ground and substance of what is named the heart, namely the primordial energy that is will. Descartes, in studying these two parts of the mind that are the intelligence and the will, had said, as we have seen, that intelligence, no matter how active it may be, was, absolutely speaking, in comparison to the will, passive, and the will essentially active. For him, the first source of truths, without making an exception for the highest among them, is to be found in the divine will. This was to attribute to the will a superiority over intelligence, and this is what, before him, in taking inspiration from



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Christianity, had already been achieved by the philosopher and theologian Duns Scotus, member of the Franciscan order that in the thirteenth century retrieved, with more enthusiasm than any other, the tradition of the One who said: ‘I have come to set the world on fire, and would that it were already kindled!’ Pascal adds to the Cartesian doctrine an important feature, for not only does he subordinate the understanding to the will, but he also reduces the very knowledge of first principles to the heart. Different from mind, the heart has, with its own objects, its own science, a method that is particular to it: ‘The heart has its own order; the intellect has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating sequentially the causes of love; that would be ridiculous. Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct. It is the same with Saint Augustine. This order consists chiefly in digressions on every point that has a relation to the end.’ For Pascal, therefore, the order of the heart is unlike the order followed in the sciences, based on abstract principles analysed by definitions into their integral elements, but, on the contrary, since it is a matter of action and willing, it is based on the end, the determining cause of affection and movement. As for what Pascal says of these ‘digressions on every point relating to the end’, since he holds that this order is the one employed by the Gospels, perhaps he means that, in his opinion, if one proceeds in the mathematical and physical sciences by something like a unilinear series of deductions, in morality (and one could say the same of art) one has much rather to show, in diverse subjects independent of each other, how they are explained by a single principle, to which they are related as to a common centre of convergence. This account recalls Descartes’s theory of induction in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, where he opposes to deduction, which proceeds by a rectilinear series of developments, induction or enumeration, by which one collects, in separate genera, aspects whose similarities suggest to intelligence the idea of a common principle. It also makes us think of the Leibnizian theory, so very close to ideas most precious to Pascal, according to which wherever it is a question not of quantity but of quality, it is no longer by analysis and calculation of containment [contenance] that mind advances, but by combinations or syntheses, whose basis is assimilation, and whose ultimate ground is agreement [convenance]. Finally, what is in itself this centre to which the heart teaches us to relate everything, this extremity towards which everything that belongs to intuitive mind, to feeling, to judgement tends, whether it is near or far? A higher will with which it is our destiny to be reunited. Presently, we are an admixture of ‘mind and mud’. Immaterial, and consequently immortal, the soul is bound to matter and thus distracted from itself. ‘The soul is thrown into the body, in which it finds number, time, dimension. It reasons about this and cannot believe that there is anything else.’ Man occupies thus an intermediate

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position between nothingness, towards which extension and number are inclined, and absolute existence, which is divine, and towards which its own essence carries it. Hence our condition in this life is, in a general way, mediocrity. These two opposed extremes between which we are suspended are brought into an image in Pascal’s striking characterization of the two infinities of greatness and smallness: ‘The entire visible world is only an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea can come close to imagining it. We might inflate our concepts to the most unimaginable expanses: we only produce atoms in relation to the reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere in which the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere … For what is man in the infinite? … Man is nothing in comparison with the infinite, and everything in comparison with nothingness, a middle term between all and nothing. He is infinitely severed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their principle are for him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he arises and the infinity into which he is engulfed.’ ‘Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. – Limited as we are in every way, this state which holds the mean between two extremes is present in all our impotence … Too great distance or proximity hinders our view. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tend to obscurity, too much truth is paralysing … First principles are too self-evident for us … Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education … In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. – This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.’ In order to reduce these lofty considerations to their proper import, it would be necessary to add that Descartes, and Leibniz after him, examining the infinite more rigorously, have shown what Kant was to develop after them both, namely that we conceive in nature only the indefinite, and that is to say magnitudes that cannot be limited and shrink back from the imagination that pursues them; but that the infinite, which is nothing other than absolute mind, a wholly intelligible being which thought feels obliged to conceive as transcending any limit, is a quite different thing that is indeed grasped, no matter what Kant said of this, by intelligence. But, in the idea of the infinite, far from suffering, reason is at ease, every limit being an obstacle and irritant for it, and even more at ease than reason is will, whose most essential characteristic, as Descartes says, is infinity. Pascal said: ‘The eternal silences of these infinite spaces strikes fear in me.’ That is the language of the imagination. Thought and will have no dread of the infinite. Only there can they fly as freely as they are able to, and in an immensity filled by the divine word, there is neither emptiness nor silence that could frighten them. The imagination can be dazzled and apprehensive, but the more thought is elevated, the less it suffers from vertigo. The



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indefinite horrifies; the infinite is reassuring. And this was indeed Pascal’s way of seeing things, just as it was that of Descartes and Leibniz. For, while depicting man as destined to unrest in mediocrity, he speaks of perfection, of divine nature, as of an ultimate where we are made to find rest. Aristotle said of virtue: it is a mean in relation to an excess and a lack of opposed passions between which it is placed: in itself, as perfection, it is an ultimate. In the moral order, man appears to Pascal as thrown about, still more than in the physical order, among the battling waves of a stormy sea. He also points, following Montaigne, to the uncountable variety of opinions and customs appearing to exclude any idea of universal law. Nevertheless, he knows – since, for him, there is a morality with its own rules – that all this diversity and contrariety to which human things, like natural things, are subject is the alteration of an universal type, an alteration resulting from the difference in circumstances, and which, like perspectival deformations when one looks from the right point of view, allow the unity of their principle to be discovered. The intermediate condition, that is at the same time and by that very fact indeterminate and uncertain, belongs to all creatures. But man alone feels it and suffers from it. Here Christianity comes to throw itself, in a certain sense, into the course of Pascal’s thinking like a tributary that feeds into and swells it. Or, rather, inculcated with Christian maxims since his childhood, but becoming more permeated by them in turning away not only from the pursuit of scientific rigour – which he ends up, like Descartes, by disdaining as useless – but also from what he calls the diversions of worldly life, and from the passions it foments. In the end, he descends headlong into the desert where he retired, in a meditation on divine things, within which his religious faith is joined to the ideas that his studies and experience formed in him throughout his interior life.

III How is it that man finds himself ill at ease in the intermediate region that he inhabits? This is because he belongs to the higher region, and because he remembers and regrets it. In this way, he is great as well as miserable, and great even by the feeling of his own misery. This misery is that of a dethroned king. In Pascal’s eyes, greatness and baseness are therefore to be found together. Two doctrines with which he is familiar have responded to these two heterogeneous parts of human nature, one doctrine advanced by Epictetus, the other by Montaigne. The first saw in man only what is great, and makes of him a god; the second saw in man only what is low in him, and makes of him a brute. According to Pascal, these two conceptions of human nature summarize the whole history of philosophy. This is

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what he presents to de Saci in the famous meeting which has been conserved for us by Fontaine, and what several passages from the Pensées present to us. Only Christianity, for Pascal, knows the double nature of man, and has offered an explanation of it. This explanation, such as it is to be found in Paul and Augustine above all, is that man has fallen, as a result of a culpable pride, from a state of original perfection into the sphere of nature, where passions are raised in him that, in a theological manner, are understood under the heading of concupiscence. This is the origin of the baseness in which traces of greatness remain. Radical evil is the self; the self becoming for itself its own end, the self being posited as a God. The self is thus detestable. In the highest antiquity, where the idea of the common good was universal, the dominant maxim was that of devotion, at least with those who were examples for everyone else. The trace of this way of thinking remained in the social world that Pascal traversed, and in which it was, as we have seen, a preferred opinion of those who frequented it that it was necessary to hide the self. Christian religion, wholly founded on the idea of sacrifice, taught Pascal with a particular force the same doctrine. Thus it is not enough, as he says, to hide the self; it has to be suppressed. Civility dissimulates it: religion annihilates it, in replacing it with what theology calls charity. It has been pointed out that there is a moment in Pascal’s life where, straying from this path, he had not fully recognized a scientific debt to a predecessor. In the work that he published on the experiment carried out for him at the Puy-de-Dôme, which verified one of Torricelli’s conjectures in explaining by the weight of air the rising of liquids in tubes at the top of which was a vacuum, Pascal claimed that this experiment was his own invention. Descartes claimed to have already suggested it to him two years previously. It seems that the opposing assertions of these two great men were equally sincere. Aware of the fact that the water in a suction pump rose only to a certain height, and also of this other fact, signalled by Torricelli, that a heavier liquid, in similar conditions, does not rise as high, Descartes had conjectured that the phenomenon could be explained not by the abhorrence of the void then attributed to nature, but rather by the properties of the liquid or of the receptacle in which it rose, or by the weight of the air that pushed down on it. It is in these terms that he must have advised Pascal, in one of his meetings with him, to test the last of these three hypotheses on one of the mountains in Auvergne at various elevations at which the column of air, at different heights, would differ in weight. At this time Pascal accepted the abhorrence of the void, which Descartes certainly did not; and resisting some of Descartes’s physical theses Pascal was able to pay little attention to his opinion, perhaps even hardly to countenance it. Conversely, after the success of the experiment at the Puy-de-Dôme that served to discard two of the three hypotheses between which he was undecided, Descartes could have easily forgotten the contrasting views, and the theories that motivated them, which he joined to



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the advice to carry out this experiment, and to have persuaded himself that he had communicated to Pascal more light without any admixture of obscurity than had in fact been the case. Torricelli, in contrast, had apparently proposed only and purely the conjecture that the rising of the liquids was an effect of the weight of the air. Pascal, struck by this, did not consider himself to owe anything to the Florentine physicist, and perhaps really did not owe anything to him. We have good reason to suppose, moreover, that a little reflexion led Descartes to recognize that Pascal, on this point, was not really in his debt. Far from showing any resentment towards Pascal, one sees Descartes, from Sweden to where he had travelled, exchange with him experiments on this very same subject, which they had previously discussed, of the weight of air. It seems in the end that Pascal, when he was freed from his former belief in nature’s abhorrence of the void, when, above all, he renounced the sciences and the glory he had promised to himself, henceforth almost solely concerned with the much graver question of good and evil, and, with the anxiety of an increasingly scrupulous conscience, full of an ever-increasingly ardent desire to cleanse himself, in repentance, of any stain on his life, came to wonder if he had not perhaps failed to meet an obligation, however inconsequential, that he may have had towards the great philosopher, and that from there grew the aversion that he conceived and expressed with so much force for the weak advisor that is the spirit of personality. In any case, whatever we make of this supposition, who knew better the supreme temptation, that of self-deification, and who, consequently, was able to measure better its danger than he whose childhood, precocious to the point of being prodigious, dazzled all those who were witness to it, among whom were the finest minds of the century, the one who, in his rapid career, seemed to be the greatest genius ever known? The self being opposed in us to God, it is we alone, says Pascal in the name of the Gospels, that we should hate, and God alone that we should love. We should remark, before going any further, that Pascal, with his usual ardour, forces here the sense of the Gospels in a way that narrows it. We should also remark that the Gospels do not prescribe the wild solitude into which the Oriental fakir plunges, and which Pascal was taken by. Christ says in them, in comparing himself to the precursor who had lived in the desert on woodland honey and grasshoppers, that, as for himself, he is an eater and drinker (manducans et bibens); that he does not, in other words, disdain taking his place at the table of human beings; and it is after an evening meal, surrounded by men whose lives are mixed up in his own, closest to him the one he loves more than the others, that after the singing of a hymn, hymno dicto, he founds the supreme ritual, consummation of the antique mysteries, in which the divinity is communicated to all. Another similar remark. Pascal says: ‘I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it.’ But in signalling that the greatest obstacle to perfection lies in wealth, Jesus Christ did not say in an absolute way: ‘Happy is the pauper!’ He said: ‘Happy is he who is poor through spirit’,

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and that is to say the one who, amidst wealth – and similar in this to the philosopher who, seeing his slaves exhausted by the sacks of gold that they were carrying, made them immediately stop – disdains wealth for the sake of something better. This is not to act as Francis of Assisi, who, on one of Giotto’s frescos, selects poverty as a wife, and like his disciples, who wanted for bread only what they had begged for, both of which are beautiful symbols of a sublime disinterest; happy is the one who places the good in the ‘sole necessary thing!’ In order to realize in all its greatness the evangelical ideal to which he aspired, and which he would perhaps have attained if life had not been prematurely taken from him, Pascal had therefore to raise himself higher to this perspective signalled by Christ, from which moral perfection can be considered, not as dependant on such and such a particular form of existence in the sphere of the senses and imagination, but as wholly consisting in a state of the heart and of the will. Pascal himself, moreover, after having said: ‘I love poverty’, adds: ‘I like goods, because they provide the means to provide for the poor.’ The purely spiritual ideal is, in any case, the end towards which his thinking aims, the point where his philosophy and religion come together. Humanity having fallen, because it has detached itself from its own principle, it is necessary, in order to raise it up, that this principle itself descend into it; it is necessary that the principle lower itself into this region where humanity has let itself fall, that it make itself a mediator, so to speak, and that it bring humanity back, reborn, to the extremity of perfection for which it was made. This is what is called incarnation and redemption. How to understand charity? How to understand redemption? According to Pascal, we cannot, no more than we can understand how the soul was originally, as he put it, thrown into the body. ‘Man is to himself the most prodigious object of nature, for he cannot conceive what is body, still less what is mind, and least of all how a body can be united with a mind. This is the summit of his difficulties (that is to say, this is the most obscure of his problems), and yet this is his own being.’ And he cites Saint Augustine, who said: ‘The way in which souls are attached to bodies is incomprehensible, and yet such is man.’ And, indeed, although it can be established, with all the great philosophers, that the lower part of our nature has its ground, and, consequently, its form in the higher, which is mind, and although it is not impossible – following the likes of Plato, Plotinus and others – to glimpse something of the secret of fascination forcing the principles of a higher order to descend into natural existence, one will nevertheless have sought in vain to demonstrate, in detail, how mind can give birth to nature, how it can receive from nature impressions or impress movement on it. Descartes, with the high idea that he had of mind, could not admit that it was transfused, so to speak, into body by what has been called, since Suarez, physical influx: it is necessary to admit, says Descartes, without pretending to explain it, that it was in an intimate and effective commerce with the body. Beside the profoundly heterogeneous ideas of the soul and the body, it was necessary to admit a third, quite different idea,



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which they were not sufficient to explain: that of their union, embracing both sensibility, which is passive, and motility, which is active, the former being analogous to the understanding, the latter to the will. This was a fact that had to be recognized, without attempting – as Malebranche and Leibniz did, following Geulincx – to dissociate from it its integral elements (then putting them back together as well as possible), and even, as Leibniz tended to do, to reduce the lower element to a simple appearance of the higher, thus giving an opening, at least for the explanation of nature, to a perfect idealism. The negative element, this ‘non-being’ which Plato already wanted us to account for, thus eliminated in theory, nevertheless reappeared in experience, and in reducing it to an effect of a pure illusion, the illusion still remains a mystery in us, in the same way that outside of us the joining of an element of limitation and privation to the positive principle remains a mystery. Pascal does not inquire any more than Descartes why the soul has been thrown into the body, and he also does not inquire how it was able, originally, to sin, and still less how sin or the tendency to sin can be passed from soul to soul. He does not inquire either – despite the efforts made by Jansenius, following Saint Augustine, to illuminate the problem – how it was possible that the divine will comes to join itself, in order to heal and redress it, to human will. These are facts, certain by everything that they explain, but which themselves are inexplicable, the final mysteries into which all other mysteries resolve themselves. ‘For man, the end of things and their principles are invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret.’ Furthermore, that the end and the principle are one and the same thing is not a veritable obscurity. As, before Pascal, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes all agreed, it is pure light. Only, pure light is too bright for our weak sight, and dazzles it. It is not the same for the immediate relation of things to their principles and to their ends, of their beginnings and their ends. ‘I do not know’, said J.-B. van Helmont in his figurative style, ‘the way in which the principles of things express their gifts.’ This is Pascal’s conception of the mysteries of beginning and end, between which temporal existence is caught. They explain everything: they cannot be explained. It suffices that an irrefragable authority guarantees them. This authority is that of the heart, where God speaks. Pascal gathered up, classified all the proofs available to reason in order to establish the truth of Christian religion: these proofs are miracles, and among the miracles, at their head, stand the prophecies. ‘Nothing’, he concludes, ‘is more certain than religion’; but he immediately adds that ‘religion is not certain’. The point is that if, in the geometrical order, beginning with definitions, one can obtain conclusions of an irrefragable certitude, it is not the same when it is a matter, either of facts, that one knows only by testimony, or of relations to be established by means of comparing these facts. Here one cannot go beyond the probability whose great import and great utility nobody knew better than Pascal, but that he also understood well enough

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always to leave room for chance and doubt. The rule of chance [règle des partis] is what the players have to follow in order to distribute equitably the stakes. To follow it in religion, as everywhere, is wisdom. Absolute certitude resides elsewhere. The heart is where it belongs, and it is here also where religion, strictly speaking, resides. ‘Religion is God sensitive to the heart.’ Consequently, the veritable teaching of religion, the one that all others prepare for, is inspiration. Where Pascal first wrote ‘revelation’ in the following passage, he then wrote ‘inspiration’, as if to render more exactly his thought: ‘There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be opened to proofs, must be confirmed by custom, and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations, which alone can produce a true and salutary effect.’ The utility of reasoning, following the rule of chance, consists in opposing to the reasons that irreligion opposes to religion contrary and stronger reasons, thus confounding sophistry. The utility of custom is, as Pascal says somewhere, to ‘bend the machine’, that is to say, to reduce by practices and habits conforming to religion, the resistance of the self, which is always ready to defend itself against what humiliates it. This is the meaning of the famous passage of the Pensées where, in an imaginary dialogue, after having exposed his theory of chance to someone who resists and says: ‘Is there no way of seeing underneath the cards? – I am being forced to wager, and I am not free, and I am constituted in such way that I cannot believe’, he responds: work therefore on convincing yourself not by argumentation and proofs of God, but by the diminution of your passions. – ‘Learn from those who were once bound like you, and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began: by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile. – But this is what I am afraid of. – And why? What have you to lose? This will lessen your passions, which are your stumbling blocks … What harm will befall you in choosing this course? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, sincere, a true friend … I tell you that you will gain even in this life, and that, with every step you take on this road, you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible that in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing.’ And finally: ‘If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is spoken by a man who has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being, infinite and without parts, before whom he lays all he has, for you also to lay before Him all you have for your own good and for His glory, so that strength may be given to lowliness.’ That is to say that at the price of this baseness divine force is acquired.



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Is it true that with these words Pascal – he who, not content with making such a marvellous use of his own mind, said that man drew all his dignity from thought, and that by it he was greater than the universe – wanted to say that intelligence has to be renounced in surrendering oneself to wholly material practices? He wanted to say, as indeed he said elsewhere, that in the matter of religion, given that the aim is for God to fill a soul that was previously full of itself, and which for that reason resists him, the means bringing us the closest to such a goal consists in breaking the soul’s rebellion by humility. Whether or not practices are employed, according to the time and state of ideas, that bear the stamp of the ultimate ideas for which they are supposed to prepare us, more essential is the principle that it is by humiliations that one becomes open to inspiration. Humility and, consequently, inspiration, constitute, according to Pascal, the whole of Christianity. In the ancient religions, the aim was also to enter into communication with God. It was also the supreme goal of the philosophies. Better informed about their history, Pascal would not have reduced them simply to two systems, the one full of the idea of the greatness of man without God, the other of his baseness. However, in the great systems that he hardly knew, among all the views analogous to those of Christianity that he would have encountered, like Saint Augustine he would have noticed a considerable deficiency in them. I can find everything in them, said Augustine, except Jesus crucified. Christianity was characterized in particular by a more profound and immediate awareness than ever before of evil, the primary source of all ills, and, consequently, by a more profound and immediate awareness than ever before of what is veritably good. To a stronger feeling for the vice of egoism there corresponded, therefore, a stronger feeling for the virtue sensed at all times by heroic souls, namely charity. Hence the idea of the willing devotion of God himself, a conception which was far from foreign to antiquity, but of which it offered, compared to Christianity, only vague and pale images. This idea is, for Pascal, religion as a whole. Just as reasoning, when it has accomplished what it can accomplish, just as the practices humiliating the recalcitrant personality can still only prepare for the revelation by the heart, so too in Christianity everything, even sacrifice, is merely preparation, figuration of a unique truth, which is the gift that God makes of himself in the heart through charity. Did not Jesus Christ himself say that another would come after him, one Called or Invoked, who would finally teach non-figuratively the whole truth? This other was the Holy Spirit that theology identifies with love. All of Pascal’s Christianity inclines towards the one so Invoked. In it, he sees the perfect and definitive truth, peace and happiness. Pascal has been depicted as suffering from an incurable melancholia, as seeing everything with a sorrowful eye. He said, however: ‘A Christian is always happy.’ Always ill, and knowing that he was moving towards a premature death, he accepted illness as a grace. He wrote: ‘I wait for death in peace.’ He is not far from saying with

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Saint Paul: ‘I desire to be dissolved, knowing well that I will not be stripped, but re-clothed.’ Descartes, after having posited as the principal goal of his inquiries a longer life, came to say: ‘Instead of thinking about prolonging life, I have decided not to fear death.’ Leibniz, who thought his era showed signs of a false and pernicious way of thinking establishing itself everywhere, considers the most prominent of these signs to be ‘the horror of death’. Pascal was not only not horrified by death, but he took pleasure in it, in some way, in advance, as a passage to the sovereign good. In sum, it would be an error to classify Pascal – who certainly said: ‘The whole of philosophy is not worth a single hour of trouble’ in speaking of the philosophy in which to ‘philosophize is to mock oneself ’ – among those who hold intelligence in contempt. No other, on the contrary, knew better its nature and valued its power more highly. Only – and in this way he only went further along the path traced by the greatest thinkers preceding him – he thought that intelligence, separated from the will, loses itself in the void; he thought, in contrast, that it fell to the will, inseparable and hardly distinguishable from perfect reason, to be able to attain the supreme reality on which every other reality depends; he found its home in the heart, and sought its first principle in love. It is also an error to imagine that the world appeared to Pascal as if destined to evil and pain. He believed that true science and true religion – which are hardly different since both lead us into immediate communication, in the most hidden ground of the heart, with the divinity – allow us to participate, during this life, while waiting for an eternal existence, in divine felicity. Pascal always carried on him, between the lining and outer layer of his coat, a scrap of paper that he unsewed and resewed, over eight years, every time he changed his coat. He attached great value to it. This text, that one might call an ‘amulet’, contained the memory of two hours of rapture in which the supreme truth, as he thought, had appeared to him with a supernatural brilliance. The Year of Grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology, etc., from about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight, Fire God of Abraham, god of Isaac, god of Jacob, not of philosophers and of the learned. Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus-Christ. […]



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Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. […] My God, will you abandon me? Let me not be separated from him forever.

The text that Pascal wanted always to have on his person, as an unforgettable testimony to his celestial vision, can be called a hymn to the divine ‘fire’, a passionate hymn of faith, tenderness and happiness.

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10 Metaphysics and Morals With the considerable progress in recent centuries of the mathematical, physical and historical sciences, the idea that philosophy, bound within ever-narrower limits, will disappear one day is becoming a majority view. The view has been promoted by, in particular, the author of the system that he named Positivism, particularly in his early work. Only what falls under the physical senses is positive, i.e. proven, and the sole task was to study its constant relations of simultaneity or succession in order to profit from it in the conduct of life. Everything else amounted merely to fictions that had had their day. This remainder consisted of, first of all, supernatural beings or gods, whom humanity had made the more or less capricious authors of everything around it; it also included the abstract entities with which, in a second epoch, the metaphysicians had replaced these gods. The task of a third epoch, the modern epoch, was to dispel the phantoms of the second epoch as much as the first, and thus to bring to an end the reign of metaphysics as much as religion. Not long before the emergence of Positivism, the author of Criticism had already attempted to demonstrate the nullity of metaphysics, and had reduced theoretical philosophy to an analysis of the faculties of knowledge, an analysis supposed to convince them of their inability to transcend the horizon of the physical sciences. It does not seem impossible to appeal against the judgement delivered by Kant and Auguste Comte. The successors of the former in his own country took up once again, in order to push them still further, the speculations he had condemned; and the latter, at the end of his career, himself ventured out on paths similar to those that he had wanted to eliminate forever. Moreover, today an increasing number of minds aspire to go beyond the limits in which Criticism and Positivism had sought to enclose us. The particular sciences studying the facts surrounding us obey rules and follow general principles. Is it not necessary that there be, over and above these sciences, a science that studies rules and principles? To which particular science would it belong to write a ‘Discourse on Method’ or a treatise on the ‘Philosophy of Science’? Is it not the business of a somehow different form of knowledge to delimit the domain of the different sciences, to define their goals and means? Moreover, the particular sciences, even while aiming to reduce themselves to assemblages of sensory phenomena,

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cannot avoid having perpetual recourse to principles of a different nature binding these facts to each other. Do we not need a different science that examines and appreciates these principles? Were we to prove that they are but vain fictions, such a science would still be required in order to prove it. If we have to philosophize, as one of the ancients said, we have to philosophize; and if we ought not to philosophize, we still have to philosophize. With theory marginalized, said Kant, there remained practice; metaphysics nullified, there remained morality; and morality, grounded on an idea, always present to us, of duty or a law to be followed – together with the beliefs, without knowledge, accompanying it – is self-sufficient. But what is this ‘we’ if we cannot know anything of any existence? What can a law be for he who knows not what and even if he is? And what is this law itself when reduced to a sterile generality? In Positivism, instead of ‘duty’, the only practical rule for each of us, sensory facts being the whole of truth, is one’s tangible interest. But then what happens to what even in our own appetencies is still disinterested? The system fails to take into account the best in us. Criticism and Positivism seem to be insufficient for the demands of the understanding, but it is not even clear that they suffice for the demands of the heart. There is thus nothing more natural than to see, as we see at this very moment, many minds happily re-tread the paths opened up by the great religions and the great philosophies, in the hope of attaining by redoubled efforts the goals at which they aimed. In the earliest periods, man thought himself surrounded on all sides by invisible powers whose manifestations were natural phenomena. These powers were conceived on the model of the one that they found within themselves, namely the will. Though often redoubtable and vengeful, they were thought to be in general kindly, and the perfections of nature were taken to bear witness to them. ‘The wonders of the world’, said Leibniz, ‘made thought rise to a higher principle.’ These powers were, in the end, supposed to have granted being to mortals by making them emerge from the place where they had resided, and it was thought that it was human destiny to return, after passage on this earth, to that place. This gave rise to the practices through which, in recognizing the goods already received, it was hoped that new ones could be obtained, and above all the supreme good of a return to the divine domain. According to these conceptions, the divinity, on which everything depended, was hidden in a sort of night. The principal religious rites were supposed to allow the faithful to enter into it. This is what led them to be called, by the Greeks, ‘mysteries’. Let us add that at bottom, and without being distinctly aware of it, it was thought, from these early times, that the most praiseworthy of practices was to imitate the gods in their highest perfections. They have given everything; one among them has even sacrificed himself. It was necessary to give oneself, to offer oneself up following their example; consequently, we find instead of mutual hate, which has occasionally



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been considered as an essential characteristic of the first families, the hospitality which in Homer has a beggar, to whom primitive peoples sacrificed what they most cherished, welcomed as a representative of Jupiter. Such was the moral consecration of the idea at the basis of primitive religions, according to which everything emerged from an inexhaustible source of wealth and liberality. On the scene came philosophy, which sought to see more clearly that which instinct had only glimpsed. For those who founded it, its enterprise was not, as was later the goal of materialism and positivism, to negate invisible action, the first cause of phenomena, but rather to demonstrate its necessity through the series of visible means by which it realized its goals, and to distinguish it from them. It is thus that the Leibnizian theory came to distinguish more sharply than ever before sensory appearance and the occult power that intelligence discovered beneath appearance. If, in the phenomena, movements are successive, and thus antecedent conditions of their appearance, in each movement and in each of its moments there is, says Leibniz, a secret tendency that is what is most real within them, the rest being only a superficial change of relations. In the old Roman religion, in each of the successive phases of phenomena a particular divinity was at work. This is what philosophy came to transform in removing from nature the legions of secondary and half-personified forces, and in substituting for their irregular operation the constant courses of visible facts through which an invisible power aims at an ultimate arrangement. And at the same time as it elevated the causes and the ends at which they aimed, it was philosophy again which, in perfecting its methods, helped the nascent sciences to determine with an ever-increasing exactitude, independently of any recourse to first principles, the secondary principles and their linkage. Induction and analysis go back to Socrates and Plato. In this double effort, philosophy does not eliminate religion: it pushes out an idolatry that was mixed up in it and impeded it. What it takes away from half-gods that might satisfy the imagination, but not intelligence, it puts into more profound sources. This is what the founder of Greek philosophy, Thales, expressed first of all in saying: everything is full of the gods. There are, says Vico – he who first founded the philosophy of history in distinguishing the different epochs, similar in all nations, of the development of ideas – two sorts of knowledge: reflective knowledge (sapienza riposta), which is that of philosophers, and spontaneous or instinctive knowledge, which he calls popular (vulgare) knowledge. These two sorts of knowledge or science are not opposed to each other: they differ as two degrees of the same development in which the two faculties of imagination and reason predominate successively. The first science has a poetic form; it expresses in figurative, metaphorical terms, what the second expresses properly.

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He could have added that if of the two sciences the first is more obscure, it often has, conversely, a more profound truth and suggestive power. This is what the Greeks showed that they understood when, though taken as they were by their own intellectual culture, they attributed to barbarians the most fecund of their inspirations, such as Orpheus or Zamolxis. As a result of the progress of rigorous science, it came to pass that it often took the visible conditions of the phenomena that it sought and discovered to be the causes from which the phenomena arose. Such was the view which, to take a recent example, the great physiologist Claude Bernard was led to adopt when he supposed that knowledge of anatomical elements would suffice for the explanation of physiological phenomena; a view which he himself undermined in recognizing that in order to account for organization there is also a need for a higher principle, and above all when he added, at the end of his career, that it was man that explained the animal. The consideration of beauty – from which emerged, as we have seen, in Leibniz’s judgement, the earliest religions – was what, with the Greeks, more sensitive to this consideration than any other people, carried philosophy the highest and the furthest. The Pythagoreans, seeing that there was no beauty without proportions, which are relations of magnitude, made of numbers (together with unity, their measure) the invisible principles of the visible. But this was to reduce beauty, for which a more elevated principle was later discovered, to mathematical elements, which are only its conditions. This was, in a general way, to reduce things to elements that transcended, it is true, the senses, but which nevertheless belonged to the understanding as still mixed with the imagination, and not to what Descartes would call, to denominate what is untainted by anything sensory or visible, pure intellection. Sophistry, however, in the name of ideas reducing everything to the sensory, with the variations of every kind to which it is subject, made any certain rule of conduct impossible, and surrendered life to the passions and inferior interests. A man of heroic mind came to prove that, in order to explain the order in disorder, it is necessary that there be archetypes of moral qualities, independent of individual weaknesses. This man was Socrates, in whom the oracle of Apollo, spirit of order, saluted the wisest of the Greeks, and who nevertheless knew only, as he said, about matters of love. But this was enough, if not to build metaphysics or first philosophy wholly from scratch, then at least to lay its foundations. On this basis Aristotle, Descartes and Pascal were to establish it. Plato took the types indicated by Socrates to be qualities existing in themselves, invisible, beyond the sphere of the visible. These qualities or forms, these ‘ideas’, under which matter moved, were the true beings from which all the rest, in their mutability, was only an imperfect imitation; and in the last period of his teaching, reducing these qualities to quantities, to numbers, Plato returned, albeit with



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substantial reservations, to Pythagoreanism. His disciples followed him, except Aristotle, who was able to say: philosophy as a whole has today become mathematics. Returning to numbers was to lower idealism to a perspective proper to the materialists, the perspective according to which the principle of things are held to be the elements that they envelop. The ‘ideas’, Aristotle remarks, offer nothing that could explain movement, in which the whole of nature consists; they are rather grounds for immobility. Consequently, it was inevitable that they would be considered, as the Pythagoreans had considered their numbers, as materials rather than causes. The world, as Plato says somewhere, is a mixture of ideas. Aristotle’s view was quite different. The goal posited by first philosophy, which is to make known not the attributes and accidents of being, but being in itself, had not yet been attained, but the reason for this was, following Aristotle, that it had begun by considering pure notions (lo&goi). Still novice, the understanding took the principles of objects to be the modes that are, in effect, merely their accessories serving to classify them. Instead of penetrating into the interior of things so as to discover there the secret of their individuality, and that is to say of their reality, the understanding had remained with what it could detach from their exterior, and which it established as existences, as separate substances. This was to take creations of its own making for the principles of things. In this new enterprise of abstraction, there was nevertheless a remainder of the old procedure, proper to poetry, of personification; empty conceptions were granted the appearance of real existence. This was, as Aristotle thought, to produce poetic metaphors instead of reasons. By taking abstract generality for reality, believing the genus to be more real than the species, and the species more real than the individual, one advanced, in truth, only towards the void and nothingness, under the illusion of progress in the knowledge of beings. Moreover, in nature there are oppositions everywhere, but they are formed from terms of which the one, in reality, is the privation of the other; in abstract generalities, all the more so the more they are abstract, the contraries stand against each other on an equal footing: of non-being one says, like of being, that it is. Why would one prevail over the other? This gives rise to a way of conceiving the world according to which there is no hope of seeing a conciliation of oppositions, and antagonism seems irremediable. Later, Scholasticism had a similar procedure and way of seeing. It also took empty ‘formalities’, logical products of the understanding, as the favourite object of its speculations; and often its adherents deserved this appellation: Gens ratione ferox et mentem pasta chimaeris.1 Kant, in the modern period, refusing to admit any immediate or intuitive knowledge of invisible realities, reduced to pure ‘formalities’, in a still stricter

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fashion than the Scholastics, everything imagined to transcend the senses. Hence his suppression of all science of either the soul or God, as well as of human freedom. Neither substances nor causes. The intelligence cannot reach beyond superficial appearances and no less superficial laws of knowledge. And for every attempt to learn more about this beyond, no other result is possible than a series of insoluble contradictions. Aristotle was familiar with all realities, with nature and history, with the biological, moral and political sciences; the dialectical and mathematical constructions of Platonism, these generalizations behind which life disappeared, could not satisfy him. Nature is all movement, and ‘movement is a sort of life’. To explain being, it was not the idea or number that one had to invoke, but spirit. One maxim dominates his philosophy, a maxim that was not unknown to the greatest of his predecessors, to Plato above all, but of which he was the first to make a universal rule: this is that the ‘best’, in everything, is ‘first’. The first step of philosophy has to consist in overcoming the ambiguity introduced by the understanding and language in distinguishing between the diverse senses hidden by the vague generality of conceptions and terms. The term being has very different meanings, applying not only to what exists in itself, but also to what exists only in another, from which abstraction is able to detach it. Such are qualities; such are above all quantities, in which Pythagoreanism and Platonism claimed to find the principles of beings. Being, properly speaking, is the subject, or substance, in which modes exist, and which alone exists by itself. This is what is ‘first’; everything else, which is relative to it and depends on it, is secondary. What, then, is being, properly so called? It is, says Aristotle, action. Quod enim nihil agit, nihil esse videtur,2 as his successors will say. Action is good, for it is the goal of everything. It is also what precedes everything. And action is spirit. Thus spirit is the only true substance. Body is virtual, spirit is the actuality that is its end, and the end is also the principle. Will we agree, with the one who was, after Plato, the head of his school, that in an embryo the virtual precedes and the actual comes afterwards, since it is by the power of acting that the living being passes by degrees to energy and action, in such a way that the beautiful and the good do not appear at first, but only at the end? The embryo, Aristotle responds, emanates from an adult living being, perfect in its species. It is its action that, impressed on the embryo, leads it by degree to the perfection in which it becomes similar to its author. Priority belongs always and everywhere to action. How, indeed, could action arise from mere potency? Bare potency, as Leibniz will say, cannot even exist. There is no real potency without an actual tendency, and that is to say without some beginning of action. Instead of action being able to be explained by potency, it is action, on the contrary, that is the only explanation of potency. It is only a diminished or restricted action, and if Aristotle did not expressly



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teach this, if he limited himself to saying, without seeking an origin for potency, that the actual precedes it, it is not clear that one could, admitting the Aristotelian maxim, consider possibles, with what they have that is actual, other than as resulting from a sort of moderation by the first principle of its essential activity.3 It will be by drawing inspiration from such ideas that Plotinus will later say: God is the master of his own existence. Does Aristotle not call the nature or spirit of beings, a principle of movement and rest? In this vast universe wherein, for both Aristotle and Plotinus, inferior things present the same relations and, according to Aristotle’s expression, the same differences as superior things, are there not everywhere visible the alternatives of tension and remission, as the Stoics will say, that constitute in living beings work and rest, sleep and wakefulness? The opposition of irreconcilable contraries, to which the spirit of abstraction reduced nature, is thus replaced by an existence of two degrees, of two different states. Modes have contraries opposed to each other by the human understanding as absolutely incompatible. Being has none. It is a first term followed by a second, and then others, forming a series in which each is a potency for what precedes it, action for what follows it; a theory that makes it intelligible how opposition can finally be resolved into unity. The universe is thus formed as a series of terms that are similar but at the same time diverse, and of different heights, which the intimate presence of one and the same principle binds to each other. How can we come to know these two states of being, action and potency, which explain everything? By analogy, says Aristotle. Action and potency cannot be defined. The definitions that might be attempted only refer back to each other. The point is that first principles, without anything anterior to them from which they could be drawn, cannot be either proved or defined. First philosophy has, strictly speaking, intuition as its sole procedure. ‘One should not’, says Aristotle, ‘search for a reason for everything, which is a weakness of the understanding, but comprehend the analogy.’ We see potency and actuality exemplified everywhere; we learn thus sufficiently what it is. – Later, with the development of reflective thought, when Descartes, more than anyone else, will have called mind to reflect on itself, and thus to put into service this marvellous faculty, which is proper to it, of inner awareness [conscience intime], we will have to recognize, and this is what has to be brought clearly to light today, that analogies on the outside only lead us to find in ourselves, in our inner experience, and thus to know, if not to understand, what is action and what is potency. This entails that the first principle, the Being from which everything depends, quite different to the abstract and general being of the logicians, God, in other words – for that, says Aristotle, is God – is in itself but pure action, without being tainted by anything inferior, without any materiality. What, now, is this action? It is, says Aristotle, thought, thought consisting of intelligence and will, such as, in the end, Descartes understood it. For if everywhere else what one desires and what one

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understands, willing and desiring, are different things, of these two things, however, as Aristotle puts it, ‘the highest among them are the same’. Recognizing that in this essential identity there is yet another difference, and that willing has, after all, primacy will represent a new step forward for philosophy. A new step, but one for which the theory of action already contained the promise. It should also be added that given that what is supremely intelligible, in distinction to that which is intelligible only in an imperfect and relative way, can be only action purified of all materiality, and that this action is thought, the object of absolute thought is thought itself. In God, thought is itself its own object; it is ‘thinking about thinking’. This is a superior type of what we find in ourselves, where our own thought perceives itself. An ever-living and ever-alert intelligence, which eternally contemplates and determines itself, eternally happy just as it is given to man to be happy for a few moments, in eternal possession of what it loves – such is therefore the principle to which nature is, so to speak, suspended, the principle towards which love elevates nature and to which love brings nature closer by imitating it. The movement by which minds fold back on themselves to find themselves and to find above all the superior intelligence whence arises their light and force, is an imitation; an intelligence which, by that very fact, puts into them divine immortality. After Aristotle, Greek civilization falls into decadence. The perspective is no longer so lofty. Stoicism no longer wants to admit anything that wholly transcends the sphere of the visible. Its God is reason, but it is also fire; instead of pure action, it is a physical tension of the primordial fire that is relaxed to become, in a gradually descending series of progressive thickenings, air, water and earth, and then, after having thus given birth to all beings, comes back to its original state. This is what they called ‘economy’ or ‘dispensation’; an expression that Christian theology will apply to divine incarnation. In the last centuries of antiquity, a new Platonism – born through the influence of Judaic and Christian theosophy in which the idea of the divinity giving itself to creatures, without giving up its essential immutability – attempted to incor porate into the Platonic system the theories that Aristotelianism and Stoicism had proposed in response to it. It attributed to the first principle a capacity for development of which Platonism had said nothing, and it has this principle advance, so to speak, outside of its primordial unity, though without leaving it (proh/lqen kai\ ou) proh/lqen), thus unifying in its identity, though this is repugnant to the human understanding, two opposed states. In this way, Neoplatonism emphasizes more strongly than previous systems the mysterious nature of the first principle as transcending our faculty of knowledge, or at least our understanding, and clears thus a path both to the mysticism of the Middle Ages and to the theories, cousins of this mysticism, that will place will and love still higher than intelligence. In the Middle Ages, the Schools added little to this progress, and during long centuries the understanding, hardly attentive to the things of nature, renewed the



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ancient enterprise of positing personified abstractions, misleading products of the logical art, as principles. In this period ‘realism’ predominates, which, making realities of simple notions, takes, as Leibniz put it, the straw of terms for the grain of things. And yet the tradition is conserved within it, through the double influence of Peripatetic philosophy and Christian theology, by a rough and ready recourse to principles transcending the horizon of the senses and the imagination, and which, while waiting for more profound inquiries, protect thought from the clutches of materialism. The sciences and the arts had hardly begun to re-tread the paths along which antiquity had walked, when Descartes came to posit the inner sense, where spirit apprehends its own activity, as the basis on which the edifice, this time more solid, of first philosophy will be rebuilt, and to show that the idea, one which illuminates its own ground, of divine perfection is present in it, and to posit in this idea the model of all truth, the criterion of all certainty, the superior rule of all science. It remained for a still more advanced period to show how everything that spirit contains, everything deployed by nature is only an imitation more or less near or distant, manifest or obscure, of divine perfections. At the same time as he made of thought conscious of itself the visual foyer, in a sense, in which philosophy had to place itself in order to account for things, Descartes began to make it apparent that the profound source of thought itself is will, that will precedes judgement. Almost immediately, suffused by a religion identifying love and the divine, Pascal pointed to the source of affections called the ‘heart’ as constituting the ground of both the intelligence, according to what is highest within it, and above all of the will. In the intelligence, after as much reasoning as one wishes, everything comes back, as he said, to sentiment. This is what Descartes had taught with different terms when he explained that demonstration, in the end, only prepared for intuition. – The heart is a fortiori the ground of the will. Intellectual things form a higher world than that of sensory things. The things of the heart constitute a third realm which surpasses even that of the intellect. From combinations of matter it will never be possible to produce a thought; from intellectual combinations it will never be possible to give rise to a movement of charity: ‘this is of another order’. The third and superior order of things is that to which mystics devoted themselves: it is the order of mysterious things. Descartes had already noted the incomprehensibility of divine things. It is not that light is lacking in them; it is rather that they are too bright for our sight. Had Aristotle not already remarked that we are, in the presence of a clarity too intense, like a nocturnal bird in the presence of the day? Concerning the idea of divine perfection and the consequences entailed by it, after having said: ‘Before I move on to consider the truths that can be gleaned from Him, it seems to be very fitting to stop for a while in order to contemplate this wholly

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perfect God, to weigh up at leisure his marvellous attributes, to consider, to admire and to love the incomparable beauty of this immense light’, Descartes adds: ‘at least as much as the force of my mind, which remains in a sense dazzled by it, will allow me too.’ Everywhere knowledge seems to arrive at obscurities that seem impenetrable, in other words at something similar to what antiquity named mystery. Both attraction and affinities are mysteries; the manner in which every living thing is born and grows (I know not, says van Helmont, how the seminal principles express their virtues) is a mystery; the influence of mind on body and of body on mind is a mystery; thought, of which we have such an incontestable experience, is – a je ne sais quoi, says Leibniz – a mystery; the manner in which we apprise ourselves, while thinking, that we are thinking is a mystery; the way in which the will moves itself is a mystery. Descartes observes most of these facts without attempting any of the apparent explanations that are only ever borrowings from phenomena of an inferior order, the order of the physical senses and the imagination. It is perhaps due to not having as profound an awareness of what is special and superior in the order of thought that Leibniz attempted, vainly, to replace with his pre-established harmony between the body and the mind their real union, and to explain the free decisions of the will by a preponderance of motives which transports to the spiritual sphere a mechanism of the corporal world that is itself more apparent than real.4 Nothing, probably, has contributed more, in the modern centuries, to bring forward for philosophy the hour when it will arrive at a full consciousness of the mysteries everywhere offered to it – if not to penetrate them in their unfathomable depths, then at least to approach them as much as faculties like ours are able – than the consideration, unfamiliar to antiquity, of the idea of the infinite. A great geometer to whom Pascal confessed to being indebted for his first discoveries in mathematics, Desargues, probably by the observation of the phenomena of perspective – in which, according to the distance, the difference of magnitude diminishes – that he made into a science had been led to remark how at the infinite the contraries merge into each other. This cannot, he said, be understood, and yet it has to be admitted, our own faculty of understanding not being the measure of truth. ‘In geometry,’ says Desargues, ‘one does not reason about quantities according to the distinction of their existing either actually or only potentially, nor of nature in general with the decision that there is nothing in it that the understanding can comprehend.’ And concerning infinitely converging lines: ‘The understanding concludes that the quantities are so small that their two opposed extremities are unified; it feels itself incapable of understanding both of these two species of quantity, without having reason to conclude that either the one or the other is not in fact in nature, or to conclude the same from the properties that he draws from each, even though they seem to imply [contradiction], because he cannot understand how they are such as he concludes by his reasoning.’



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Desargues’s reflections were to be the starting point for the theories of infinity that opened for modern mathematics such new and vast horizons. But one can also reasonably conjecture that the ideas concerning divinity introduced by Judaism and Christianity also played a role. Antiquity only ever saw indetermination and imperfection in the infinite. In general, the world was for it a sphere of a definite magnitude. Aristotle remarked, however, that in order to explain the eternity, which he admitted, of the movement of this sphere, it was necessary to attribute to the first motor an infinite power, and Neoplatonism put into its God, for even more good reasons, infinity along with power. Judaism and Christianity substituted for multiple spirits, representatives of the diverse attributes of a divine nature, a unique divinity concentrating in itself what polytheism had dispersed. From here, there is merely a short step to the idea that this divinity is without limits, and, consequently, to the idea that the very same applies to the world that it had created, or, to employ with Descartes more exact language, to the idea that the world should imitate in time and space – which nothing can limit and that one ought, consequently, to consider indefinite – the absolute and transcendent infinity belonging to God. And in the divine depths the oppositions could find a conciliation that the human understanding was incapable of grasping. This is what the thoughtful Nicolas de Cusa said more resolutely than anyone else. Nature already seems to offer numerous examples of it. How does life appear to us, if not as a sort of movement by which the living being ceaselessly creates itself? But is life not in the world? Who knows if it is not everything within it? Biology seems increasingly to aim to place itself at the roots of physics. In the highest region of human thought, there is no longer appearance and probability, but experience and certitude. Does not the ‘thinking thing’ bifurcate in self-consciousness into a thinking subject and an object thought, which together, however, are only one and the same thing, the same unique existence?5 Do we not find above all, in the ‘thinking thing’, a will that does not – whatever is affirmed by mechanistic theories, which annihilate the will by explaining it – determine motives different from it, but which determines itself, cause and effect all at once? It must a fortiori be the same in a still superior sphere, that of wholly pure intelligence and will. The Aristotelian theory of action and potency, and of their relation in reality, seems to be able to help us penetrate, to some degree, the secret of this identification of contraries that is so repugnant to the human understanding. The contraries, extreme forms of a same genus, are, in reality, the same thing at the two moments of actuality and mere virtuality; and if they are two states of which the second is a diminution of the first, but in which the latter subsists, though differently (e9/teron tw~| ei]nai), it becomes comprehensible how it is not impossible for the contraries to enter into each other and to be fused together in these depths that we plumb beyond the finite, the oppositions thus resolving themselves into identity.

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All of the preceding seems to summarize quite faithfully, at least in a few of its principal traits, the development of metaphysics from its beginnings to the present day. The instinctive conceptions of the early period (as Vico had said) return to be confirmed by the meditations of the most profound thinkers. Similarly, the doctrines of the greatest religions are also to be found in them. If this is indeed the case, it is perhaps permitted to conclude that a time is coming in which minds, still so divided, will recognize that their dissensions can be explained by the different aspects of things, according to the perspective from which they are considered. The understanding, though more philosophical than the senses, only envisages them, however, with the aid of the imagination, only from the outside, while an intuitive intelligence (Descartes’s pure intellection), aiming to reach them in their interior, reaches in consciousness if not right up to this Holy of holies where divinity lives, then at least to a threshold from which its mysterious depth can be glimpsed. Pascal remarks that men generally judge well about what they see, but that they only ever look at particular aspects of objects, according to their habits or passions. The difficulty consists in making them see objects according to all their different aspects. Once this occurs, they will easily agree. Let us provide, following another of Pascal’s observations, a response to an objection often made, in our time, against philosophy: that it can propose only hypotheses that are impossible to prove, and for which, consequently, one could never obtain general agreement. The particular sciences prove with more or less convincing force, according to the nature of their objects: but of them it is true to say that they rest on hypotheses, or, as the mathematicians often say today, on unprovable conventions. Philosophy, and metaphysics above all, does not, properly speaking, prove anything, no more than it defines, these procedures only being applicable to complex objects, whereas metaphysics has a simple object. This is not to say that it lacks the means to establish truth. The method proper to philosophy for establishing truths, fundamental truths, consists in – since intuition in consciousness provides what it seeks – demanding from each of us, despite the resistance posed by prejudice and passions, and following the example of Plato’s Socrates, that he descend by reflection into his own consciousness. Here shines a light for each that allows room for neither negation nor even doubt; here is an evidence of another order than that produced by reasoning, calculation, and which is even more irresistible. ‘Everything comes back to feeling.’ This is where all the sciences end up; it is to this that high philosophy appeals, if not uniquely, than at least principally. A feeling for things of the moral order, for what relates to the affections, to the will, to the love that is their ground, is what one names the heart. To the heart belongs therefore, as Pascal also said, the last word, in everything, certainly, but eminently in the high sphere of the supernatural order. In every other subject, said the same author, attempting to obtain the approbation of men by feeling rather than



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by reason is a blameworthy thing. For the truths of a divine order, the contrary applies: one has to live in order to understand, it is the heart that teaches and judges. True metaphysics is thus not the privilege of the learned: it also belongs to those less educated. I thank thee, my God, says a Christian text, who has hidden these things to the wise and learned, and revealed them to the simple. Presented without the system of technical terms that Leibniz desired to make as little use of as possible, and which often serve only to simulate knowledge that is in fact absent, when translated by expressions borrowed from common language, and then propagated by education,6 it is not clear why the metaphysics resulting from the successive meditations of first-rate thinkers (perennis quædam philosophia) would not work its way into the crowds, and would not receive the welcome that the word of salvation had previously received there, more often than in higher ranks. * From a metaphysics encapsulating the idea of a first and universal principle which gives even to the point of offering itself up, an ethics must emerge that is its application to the conduct of life. The thinker who considered himself to have undermined metaphysics forever and from the ground up, and who in fact ruined only an apparent metaphysics, wanted to reopen through ethics a route to the infinite and absolute. But his ethics is again nothing more than what he proved the metaphysics of the imagination to be, namely an empty form void of content, a law of ‘duty’ without justification and without determinable applications. There is a ‘duty’; but what is this duty? True metaphysics offers a response. Duty is to resemble God, our model as well as our author, and if God offers himself up, our duty is to offer up ourselves. The supreme law consists in what Descartes proposed with one word: generosity. Generosity, the word says, is nobility. The generous person, says Descartes, is the one with an awareness in himself of a free will by which, independently of things, he is master of himself. We should add: of a will that comes from somewhere higher than him, and which frees him of his own individuality – which, when exclusive would amount to egoism – and carries him, as Pascal says, to what is ‘general’. This free will that the generous person experiences in himself is recognized by him as an essential element of the nature of all those of his ‘genre’, of all his peers. It can be added that he conceives it even better, even if he does not directly feel it, in them rather than in himself, seeing them, or thinking that he sees them liberated from an admixture of inferior elements whose harmful presence he experiences in himself. And this is the character of those that antiquity named, in one word, the magnanimous: ‘It belongs to those whose soul is great’, says the French philosopher, ‘to be hardly aware of their own ills and very much so of those of others.’

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Such is the ideal that the metaphysical theory seeming to emerge from the meditations of the most profound thinkers represents in the sphere of practice. This moral ideal was the one towards which primitive times tended, the one that the great epochs of Greek and Roman civilization posited, the one promoted, above all, in the Middle Ages and principally in our country, by the institution that was named Chivalry; it was the one that the sovereign whose knights were his representatives (milites regis) had to realize before anyone else. And this is what constituted the greatness of the king of France, whose special role was to devote himself to the weak. Rome and Athens, moreover, had become great because their founders had made of them places of asylum to which all the oppressed flocked. And this was, says Tacitus, the ancient aim of those who founded cities: vetus urbes condentium consilium.7 Ought not such conceptions contribute greatly to remedying the ills, to resolving the difficulties of the present hour? One complains of a division signalled everywhere, between the great parties of the city, and of the sentiments developing in it, which, instead of the fraternity that should crown the freedom gained, are dominated by mutual hostility. What better could be imagined for healing such an ill, than a doctrine, planted in the people, of reciprocal generosity, implying both mutual respect and kindness, carried subsequently to the point of devotion, to sacrifice? To complete such a doctrine, it is fitting to remember what were, in the great religions that formed the ties of societies of old, the initiations, or Mysteries, whose supreme objective was to unite men to the divinity.8 The union had to be filial, and ultimately conjugal. To prepare for it, one condition was necessary: purity. A sacrament preliminary to the sacred union was a baptism by which an absolute renouncement of everything low and demeaning was expressed. The same was the case in the rites of our Chivalry. They began with practices whose purpose was to express the thought summarized in the famous dictum: Potius mori quam foedari.9 Purity is what was called in these times honour; ‘honour’ in the Latin tongue, from where the word derives, signifies dignity, beauty. Honour and compassion, beauty and goodness, were the two degrees by which one was elevated, and such elevation will always occur through the realization of what can be named the heroic ideal. ‘I have fled evil and found the good’, sang the initiates of Eleusis. Fleeing evil is to purge oneself of the stains that make one, with the help of the lower passions, selfish; finding the good is to practise, in obeying the inspiration that always characterized great souls, the properly superhuman and divine virtue, namely generosity, carried, if necessary, to the point of an entire immolation of the self. We should remark once again, to conclude, that in the two degrees of moral perfection there are to be found the two moments on whose relation metaphysics was once founded, and on which it will, it would seem, always rest: potency, which, in the reality of things, is already tendency, disposition, movement, and the action towards which it moves. The disposition is purity, honour; the action, compassion, goodness. And just as in metaphysics, the best being always first, it is action that is



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the source and the cause of potency, so too in morals goodness is the source and the cause of purity, or beauty. In order to be capable of sacrifice, the heart must first of all be pure. Similarly, it could be said, if it were a matter of aesthetics: supreme beauty is grace, which belongs to movement, and which is, in its abandon, the expression, the sensory figure of love. And it is to make grace possible that the harmonious proportions in which beauty consists are necessary from the beginning. * In everything, first of all the perfect, the absolute, the good, that which owes its being only to itself; next there is what results from its generous condescendence, and which, by virtue of what the absolute has left behind, gradually climbs back up to it.

Notes 1. 2.

[Truly, a race mad with logic, and feeding the mind with chimeras!] [‘For a being that does nothing does not seem to exist at all’; cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum II, xvi.] 3. Cf. La Philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, 2nd edn, pp. 278–81. 4. See La Philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, 2nd edn, p. 270. 5. Cf. Rapport sur le prix Victor Cousin, p. 314. 6. See Revue bleue, 23 April 1887, Education. 7. [Ravaisson seems to have taken this citation from Vico’s Scienza Nuova (777), but Vico attributes it to Livy not Tacitus: ‘the ancient counsel of city founders’.] 8. See ‘Mysteries: Fragment of a Study on the History of Religions [infra]. 9. [Death before dishonour.]

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11 Philosophical Testament Bossuet said: ‘When God formed the entrails of man, the first thing he placed there was goodness.’ It is no less true that from the most ancient times the greatest number had to yield to the temptations of egoism and consider themselves rather than others, according to the Stoic dictum, as recommended to themselves by nature and to take their own selves, if not uniquely at least principally, as the centre of their own actions. This is, Bacon says, a poor centre for the actions of a man. Elite mortals remained faithful to the original impulsion, sympathetic to all that surrounded them, believing themselves to be born, following another Stoic saying, not for themselves, but for the whole world. The Greeks believed that these were the children of God and called them heroes.1 Greatness of soul was the characteristic of the hero. The fate of others touches them as if it were their own. They were conscious of an internal force that put them in a position to rise above their circumstances, which disposed them to come to the aid of the weak. They believed that they were called, by their origin, to deliver the earth from the monsters that infested it.2 This was exemplified above all by the son of Jupiter, Hercules, who was as valiant as he was compassionate, always generous to the oppressed, and finished his glorious career by climbing to Olympia. Hercules, touched by compassion for an old man whose son had been devoured by a formidable lion, fought this lion and forever clothed himself with its skin. On another occasion he was led into hell by his compassion for Alcestis in order to rescue her. Another hero, Theseus, the Athenian Hercules, after having descended into the Labyrinth in order to free the captives destined to become a monster’s prey, erected an Altar in the middle of Athens to Compassion, thus honouring her as a goddess. He wanted Compassion to be the inspiration for the city that he founded. Let us add that Compassion was in all likelihood only another name for the great goddess Venus, the goddess of love and peace, to whom the Acropolis originally appears to have been consecrated. Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, after having furiously wreaked revenge on Hector for the killing of his beloved friend, relents at the end of the poem due to Priam’s pleading and gives Priam his son’s corpse. The great Hellenic poem does not celebrate

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so much the anger of Achilles but rather his compassion for the old father, whose son he had killed because the latter had killed his friend. It was in his compassion above all that the greatness of his heart was manifest. The epithet that characterizes the hero more than any other is ‘magnanimous’. This was the hero, and this is how he represented the gods who granted everything. Homer, still imbued with heroic maxims, calls them the givers of goods. Aphrodite, the queen of heaven, the goddess of beauty and love, is named the donor par excellence (dori/tij).3 At a time when it was generally believed that everything had emerged from the earth, even the heavenly bodies, the God who governed over this domain was represented as at once opulent and liberal: Pluto was named ‘the Rich’ by the Greeks; and Dives, also ‘Rich’, by the Latins. On ancient monuments, Pluto is often carrying an overflowing cornucopia, and Serapis, who later takes his place, a bushel. Pluto also often carries a kind of fork that the painters, Raphael amongst others, have taken to be a weapon in the hand of Satan, but that in reality was the hoe that could raw the fruits of the earth, the fruits from which it was believed that the first men lived. This is why the Odyssey places a meadow of asphodels in hell and not, as Welcker believed, because of the alleged sinister aspect of this plant. The Indian god Purusha shares his limbs between his worshippers. Ceres and Bacchus, in the mysteries of Eleusis, provide food for the initiated, for Ceres is herself the bread and Bacchus is the wine.4 In ancient mythology, therefore, the belief in divine beneficence is everywhere. Far from defiance and hate reigning among men and in their families, as the author of the Cité antique believed, following Hobbes and Petrone, nothing was more honourable than hospitality. The stranger, if nothing suggested that he was an enemy, was welcomed as a messenger from above.5 Sacrifices of the most precious things were made in order to celebrate his arrival. Tacitus even says that someone was reduced to begging for the rest of his days after having received a stranger at his house. Common men, finding no force and no greatness within themselves, see outside of them also only weakness and smallness. Smallness is that to which their whole philosophy is reduced and we would not go far wrong if we called it nihilism. Men of nothing, common men have no difficulty admitting that everything was formed from nothing. In the awareness of his weakness, the common man scarcely believes that he has any other destiny than to maintain, despite the onslaught of circumstances, a precarious existence for as long as possible; to acquire in order to live was almost his only worry. If the phenomena that occurred around him made him believe in invisible powers on which he depended, it was as if they were greedy and envious beings from which he should expect little good and much bad. The heroes had completely different ideas about these things and about human destiny.



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Each of these noble and elite figures, that Descartes and after him Leibniz will name the generous, has a soul whose character consists in being sympathetic to all others, and these other souls exist in them as much as, if not even more than, in themselves, and this is also what we would call a complex simplicity or a multiple simplicity. Each of these persons willingly recognizes what he finds within himself in others. The generous person, following Descartes and Leibniz, is aware of carrying within him a force by which he is the master of himself, a force that constitutes his dignity, and that equally constitutes the dignity of all others. Furthermore, he is disposed to recognize in all beings, of whatever order they may be, something analogous. This is the formal belief of Leibniz and perhaps it is only in appearance that Descartes recognizes the existence of the soul only in humanity. ‘It is difficult to believe’, Bossuet says, ‘that in the bodies that he seems to reduce to extension alone, in order to highlight the superiority of the mind, he has not also supposed something more fundamental.’ Therefore, the belief that the great minds of the earliest times must have fundamentally shared, with Thales, the most ancient of the philosophers, is that all is full of souls and that these souls, however different they may be, are no less a single thing whose root is divinity.6 Thus was formed, from the most ancient times, two different ways of understanding things: according to one, things are reduced almost entirely to scattered inert bodies, assembled or dispersed in the void by blind chance; according to the other, the world was entirely made and ruled by hidden powers, souls or Gods. From these two ways of thinking, two philosophies slowly emerged.7 The one that Cicero calls plebeian, that Berkeley in the eighteenth century calls minor philosophy and Leibniz calls paupertina philosophia, is the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus, for which the principal factors were the senses and the understanding, the understanding being the natural auxiliary of mathematics. The other, which we could call royal and aristocratic, is the philosophy of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle and others like them. The first, seeking the principles in inferior things that are to superior things what the materials are to the forms in which order and beauty appear, can be denominated materialism. The second, in opposition to the first, since what is subtle and fine is opposed to the vulgar, can be called the spiritual or spiritualist philosophy. According to the philosophy that, when developed, becomes Epicureanism and contains the opinions of the vulgar in germ, we know nothing except what the senses witness, nothing except for bodies or accidents of bodies. Each individual was shut up tightly within himself, occupied solely by the goods and evils that concern the physical senses. Henceforth, sensations alone, as the Sophists proclaim, were the measure of all things. Socrates, a man of heroic mind, superior to vulgar preoccupations, understood that societies could not survive with such a doctrine. Persuaded that there exist

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beyond sensory things other things on which they depend and that we know only through the intellect, he remarked that there were rules by which we could discern good and bad, justice and injustice, without which no agreement could be established, nor survive. He proved that there were generalities common to individuals and consequently a science that should prevail over their narrow conventions. Plato went further. It appeared to him that all sensible things ought to have intelligible models of their qualities, of which the former were imperfect resemblances, and that these intelligible models alone constitute true beings. These were the forms or immutable ideas that the things of nature temporarily adopt, like a submissive material. But this was to take simple modes – extracts made from things by the understanding, and which only have a real existence in individuals – for causes. It was to erect abstractions created by the understanding as principles. It was to fall into the error signalled by Tacitus in this saying applicable to all idolatry: they invent and at the same time believe, fingunt simul creduntque. This error will play a great role in all of philosophy’s history. The understanding has this faculty of detaching one set of things from another that in reality exist together This is what we call the faculty of abstraction. In this way, ideas are constituted that in reality are thoughts, acts of intelligence.8 Aristotle identified this error; he showed that what is in several things at once, or the general, does not exist in itself but in the thought that creates it.9 Only the individual can exist in this way and, consequently, only the individual can be a principle, a cause of existence. How could we admit that such things (abstractions) explain the motion and life that is all of nature? These would be, rather, the causes of immobility. For the completely intellectual and logical system of Plato, Aristotle substitutes another where the practical element, neglected or disregarded by Platonic idealism, plays the principal role. In place of pure ideas, the first causes are souls, sources of movement and life. Plato makes simple attributes beings. There are several senses of the word being, and the beginning of philosophy had to consist in distinguishing them. In the time of Plato, Aristotle adds, this distinction was not possible. Dialectic was not yet able to consider being apart from contraries. To search for a reason for everything when certain things, and precisely the highest things, are known immediately by intuition and analogy is a weakness of the understanding – weak undoubtedly because it lacks the intuitive force for it to reach the principle. This is what he claimed to do by establishing, as if it were a portal into philosophy, the distinction between different categories. It was to inaugurate research into the profound reality that they hide, against a theory of abstractions that only, as he said, reduplicates the objects that it had to explain. Research into the profound reality that they hide. To undertake this enterprise, by addressing oneself to consciousness as the source of profound truth, was to advance along the path opened by the heroism of antiquity. And who was



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better prepared for such an enterprise than he who, versed in the knowledge of all realities, physical or human, was the tutor of the last of the Greek heroes, Alexander? The strong heart desires being (Schelling), and is not content with shadows, idols and phantoms. Smaller minds are content with alleged principles that would be almost nothing, virtually innumerable abstractions of a superior order to phenomena; or if their intellect demands more, as is the case with the Platonists, they will be satisfied with abstractions of a superior order to phenomena that regulate the course of the latter, but that still do not envelop reality. The heart, containing will and sensibility, asked for more. What Schelling asks for is necessary: the being that exists, that is, to which experience is addressed, such as the being that thinks itself, and grasps itself in consciousness. This was the secret wish of the energetic souls, the heroes especially, a wish to which their actions bear witness. Aristotle thus wants to return from logical or rational drought and insufficiency to the fecund richness of experience, from discontinuity to solidarity, from the artificial to the natural. He was led by a lively feeling of reality. The beginning of positive philosophy dates from this moment. In place of an abstract and vague notion, a notion that is precise. Instead of using the faculty of abstraction and generalization that constitutes the part of the soul that is called the understanding, he listened to the practical faculty that includes sensibility and the will, and whose home is what has been called, in modern times, the heart. What is the being that, properly speaking, belongs to the first and highest of the categories, the centre to which all the others are related? This is, responds Aristotle, the action that explains nature, which is all movement.10 An attentive observer of nature, which Plato disregarded, Aristotle recognized that everything in it is movement. He also recognized, as he says somewhere, that movement is a sort of life.11 Finally, he recognized that the cause of movement is the true cause, and that life cannot result from anything except for life. (So those who claim to explain it by movement reverse the true order of things.) Phenomenal movement can arise from movement. But its first origin is something superior to movement: action. Action is like an instant that would endure without succession. This is how we try to conceive the eternal, the positive in duration, in which negation introduced succession. (Later it will be recognized that the ground of action is the will, and finally that the ground of the will is love.) To be is to act, action is existence itself. And, indeed, Cicero remarks – here as everywhere an interpreter of Greek philosophy – what does nothing or has no action also appears to be nothing. If the stone itself exists, then there is also something active and moving in the stone. Not only does all that exists act, but, furthermore, it has this property of naturally tending to dilate. The greatest souls, the heroic souls, possessed this quality in the highest degree.

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In consciousness, thought tends to spread itself into ideas in which it is mirrored in some way and recognizes itself. Each living being, having reached its point of perfection, tends to reproduce itself so as to take a fuller possession of its own being from what it engenders.12 The complete being is the mind whose nature is such that by acting it has consciousness of what it does, of what it is. Fundamentally, nothing thinks without thinking itself, although it does this in different ways and to different degrees. Perfect consciousness of the object is entirely identical to the subject in God alone. This is the summit towards which all of nature tends, from species to species, through different degrees of life, a summit of which these different degrees are more or less incomplete imitations. In self-consciousness, the mind, released from the clouds of the imagination that obscure other objects, sees itself in a pure light. According to Christian theology, this is the vision to which joy and felicity are attached, together with the admiration that supreme beauty causes. At different stages of existence, thought, which is also will, apprehends itself to a greater or lesser degree in its objects. It apprehends itself in them as divided, dispersed into diverse ideas until it finally recovers its integral unity. All of nature is made of more or less successful sketches of this supreme perfection, realizing differentiation, before a final integration. At this supreme moment, thought, according to the Aristotelian formula, is thought of thought. Fundamentally, therefore, nature is an edifice of thoughts. The species successively appearing before humanity emerges are increasingly more complete reproductions of the primitive design. By degrees the soul arrives at thinking itself, which is the summum: to think oneself, is also to will oneself, it is to consider oneself as thinking, willing, creating.13 Thought, therefore, differs from a simple and passive impression only by the inner consciousness that the subject has of the unifying and synthetic action that is itself, and by recognition. Thought is all that it can be only in its inner consciousness of itself where subject and object touch each other immediately, the one identical to the other – and thought being, according to the Aristotelian formula, thought of thought. Every other thought is a covering and imperfect image of this absolute thought. It is, indeed, by depending on the more or less obscure consciousness of itself that every thinking being thinks, recognizing in the unity of its object what it impresses on it that is of its own character. Before any particular thought, we are obliged to presuppose a constant thought, without beginning or end, which is like a chain on which the series of accidental thoughts unfolds. And it is the ground of life that we never lack and that we could not come to lack. In the beginning the best, this is what the most philosophical of the Gospels proclaims, along with Aristotelian philosophy, by its first word, when it says: ‘In the



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beginning was the Word.’ But from the beginning to the end, from the highest to the lowest in the Universe, a single formula contains everything, embracing every degree of life, the formula that Leibniz traced by saying: body itself is mind, but, unlike the pure and perfect mind, it is a momentary mind, deprived of memory, and also of prevision.14 If the best is at the beginning, if it is the principle, why does it not remain alone? It is, following Aristotle, on the basis of experience, a principle not only of movement, but also of rest or arrest. God, as Plotinus said and Descartes said after him, is the author of his own existence and the master of it. Everything that comes to exist has a cause; God is the cause of himself. Also, since we are able to suspend the exercise of our activity at will, and since this power belongs to all the natural powers, as made evident by sleep and other periods of rest, God is a fortiori capable of abandoning, at least for a while, as Christian theology says, something of his plenitude (se ipsum exinanivit).15 This is what the initiators of philosophy appeared to have thought, however confused it may have been, from the beginning; these initiators who taught native magnanimity, despite the resistance of the understanding. From such ideas, from such mores, a philosophy had to emerge that could see that everything comes from principles or causes that create by giving themselves. – A philosophy that could see it: for it is indeed the truth that the universe everywhere narrates. Those who listened to the teachings of the heart knew how to see it better than the others because they were freed from vulgar stains: ‘those of pure heart can see God’. Corporeal things are separated: incorporeal things cannot be separated; at least not in the same way. (However, h9 e0ntele/xeia xwri/zei.) Distinction is smallness. The distinct ideas are small ideas. Everything tends towards union, to unity, while passing through distinction. It is because fundamentally everything is one, pa~nta e1n kai\ (temporarily) xwri/j e1kaston, and that things go from unity to unity. A unity that spontaneously divides itself in order to recover and reconstitute itself. Thus is reproduced in nature as a whole the development of the primordial activity for the final re-establishment (a)pokata/stasij) of the mysterious e1n polla& in a i0ero/j ga&moj. If, therefore, we ask how, given the unity of the principle of things proclaimed by all of nature, it is possible to explain the plurality over which it dominates (everything is one and each thing is apart, says an Orphic verse), the solution to the problem – a problem presented first of all and then confirmed by experience and reflection – is that the parts are born from a condescendence, from a spontaneous abasement of the principle whose unity finally reappears in the ultimate constitution of the whole.16 This is what is taught by the progress, one could say the method, of nature in the production of living beings. It has always been remarked that a living being is at once a unity and a multitude.

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Aristotle had already remarked that in certain animals the parts are like so many similar wholes, and they are all ready to detach themselves in order to exist on their own. This remark was expanded upon by modern science. It has even generalized it by attributing a multiple or polyzoic life to all beings. Furthermore, it has called the animals in which multiplicity is more manifest animal colonies,17 an expression that seems to betray the thought that the animal is a whole formed from pre-existent individualities, and those who have until now attached the most importance to polyzoism tend, at least, to take multiplicity as the principle. In their systems, the smallest elements endowed with the slightest properties are the most real, and the unity according to which they are assembled is only a kind of addition that scarcely has any existence beyond the intellect. In the soul, they want to see only a secondary phenomenon that they willingly call an ‘epi-phenomenon’.18 If such an artificial whole whose unity is purely logical exists, we learn, in contrast, by an inner consciousness that there really is in us something unitary and simple that is divided into diverse thoughts and volitions, and, by an induction authorized by the analogy between what takes place in us and what nature and the progress itself of phenomena present to us, we judge that the latter phenomenal multitudes are secondary and that in each being primacy and priority belongs to a real unity. To Speusippus, Plato’s successor in the government of the Academy, who concluded with an egg – from which everything living emerged and where we see at first only a shapeless mass, out of which the beautiful and the good only arise later, a proposition that is always maintained by the materialist theory – Aristotle responds that the beginning, the principle, was not the egg, but rather the adult from which the egg derives, and in which the perfection, that the embryo in the egg arrives at by degrees, is already to be found. So it is through perfection, the good and the beautiful that life commences. Thus Aristotle says that the best is the first in everything. This is the general maxim that he opposes to all the theories that seek the principles of things if not in nothing, then at least in what is as near as possible to it. There is more. It is necessary that the best, from which everything begins and that is prior to all movement, is what impresses movement. This is what produces in us what we call our soul (a!nemoj, anima and animism), a metaphorical term that recalls the nature of wind or subtle air, mobile and powerful. And from the awareness that we have of it derives, although its moment escapes us, all of our knowledge of this thing, as certain as it is mysterious, that is motor power.19 Let us add that to the idea of this power is indissolubly linked that of an end towards which the movement tends. The idea of this end, that we name final cause, is only an abstraction detached by the understanding from the total idea of causality. The idea of the invisible cause is the only one that explains, however incomprehensible its contents may be, organic formation, and which transformism, although claiming to explain this formation by means of a vague idea of evolution, in vain maintains it can do without.



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The soul contains this idea, and it is the soul that the founder of Peripateticism refers to by the most vague terms of nature. Without ceasing to relate thought to it, the doctor Stahl dared to ascribe to the soul vital movements and all attendant physiological phenomena, following a view held by both Hippocrates and Aristotle. He is blamed, by Leibniz among others, for attributing to the principle of reflection and reasoning acts that are, more often than not, neither reflective nor reasoned. To relate to the same principle both the material phenomena that should be completely mechanical and those of the intellect was to conflate two different things. He feared a return to the completely intellectual explanations of the Middle Ages and an abandonment of both the new methods recommended by Galileo and Descartes and mechanism. Stahl, however, had taken care to explain that he did not intend to attribute to the soul in its physiological operations reasoning but reason, and did not Leibniz himself want us, though perhaps without persevering enough, to recognize, in accounts of the determinations of the soul, an infinity of petites perceptions that escape all reflection and – if not entirely, then almost entirely – consciousness. And, indeed, experience abundantly testifies to this. Even if the domain of the will and reflective thought is vast, the one called the domain of subconscious, so to speak, if not absolutely unconscious, volition and thought is even vaster still. An essay Of Habit published in 1837 by the author of the present text, by pointing out in the formation of habits the same phenomena offered by the secret operation of nature, and by following the views of Leibniz, opponent of Stahl, on obscure and barely conscious perceptions, has been able to shed some light on the obscure depths of the vital mystery. Perhaps we will also draw some insights from the study, more influential today than ever before, of the regeneration of injured parts of the body, and of the relations of regeneration to generation itself. The author of the essay Of Habit was also occupied with this issue. If by saying that organization and life cannot be understood unless we add a directive idea to the physico-chemical phenomena, Claude Bernard had meant that life implies a reflective use of the understanding (and this is how what we call the theory of final causes is understood most of the time), he would have ignored the real character of nature, which has been better defined by Stahl as reason without reasoning. It was shown in the essay Of Habit that we cannot better conceive life than by the way that this second nature that we call habit is formed, i.e. by action engendering aptitude and inclination. The initial opposition, the basis of reflection, between subject and object, gradually diminishes until it is totally extinguished, finally to be replaced by an absolute immediacy. Life thus understood no longer belongs to the order of distinct thought clarified by logical light. It constitutes what can be called a mystery, but a mystery to which ideas lead, as if by converging lines, tending to come together. Did Leibniz not say of thought: it is a je ne sais quoi? Can we be more demanding about life, whose ground is thought?

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Let us add that this thought without reflection that is all the more assured in its operation is what we call instinct, and which in nature, below the sphere of logic, tends towards and generally attains its ends. In human life, it is what causes almost all of what happens there, as well as in animal life and purely vegetative life. Given that art imitates nature, nothing in which reflection and effort can be sensed is a work of art. In a beautiful thing, the Italians say, everything appears to have been a breeze, col fiato. It is completely different from what appears to have been made with effort, con stento. Finally, what belongs to the intellectual order falling under logic can be attributed to what is called in us the understanding: all the rest belongs more closely to sensibility, to imagination and to will. We could call it the inferior part of the order of the heart. Descartes distinguishes a third thing from the body and the soul, their union, whose secret he does not claim to unveil, but whose effects alone he aims to ascertain. To this intermediary entity, a mix of the mechanical and the intellectual, he relates the passions and the whole range of phenomena occurring in physiological obscurity and the darkness of the instincts; and this is the greatest part of what happens within us and in the whole immensity of nature. It follows that although we can observe and note the phenomena that form the surface of things, we know nothing of the manner in which the transmutations of one into the other operate, and we could never know anything about it. This is the sense of Dubois-Reymond’s ignorabimus. But we have the analogy of our inner transformations in order to judge it to a certain degree. This is the special point of view of philosophy. If the mind cannot get to the bottom of the mystery, it at least attains its threshold. How can we explain that there exists in us a science so vast, so profound, often so sure, as are instincts and habits in general, but which, however, would be outside of our power? We can only do this only to a very small extent, but it is nonetheless certified by an irrefutable experience. In the face of this capital fact, a hypothesis disappears, one much in favour today, of reflex movements, which would be absolutely machine-like responses of bodies fixed to impressions and solicitations from the outside,20 movements with which the scholars who have recourse to them claim to explain not only what we call involuntary phenomena, but also, as they hope, the phenomena that appear to depend wholly or partially on the will. In such a way, everything in this world, except perhaps those purely intellectual determinations, would be subject to an irresistible fatality, and there would be no point in invoking the mind. The body would suffice for everything; if something else existed such as thought, this would be a useless piece in the universal mechanism. In contrast, in order to explain physiological phenomena by the soul, perhaps we could imagine, as I have proposed elsewhere,21 that the soul gives rise to them by



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the use it makes of the faculty of impressing movement, and thereby modifies the vessels containing the vital fluids. By dilating or tightening them with the vasomotor nerves discovered by Claude Bernard, it would alter the distances of their parts in such a way as to give rise to physical and chemical phenomena, or to suspend them, and from that all the detail of these phenomena would result.22 It could be the same with the proportions and figures in the architectonic of organization itself, for which Claude Bernard appealed in particular to his directive idea:23 this idea is reduced to a motor will guided by an unconscious or dimly conscious imagination.24 If it is in this way, or even approximately in this way, that the phenomena that life develops in each being have to be explained by the power of the soul, why should we not explain the successive production of different species in the same way? And, indeed, let us add that the acts tend to continue and repeat themselves in such a way as to give rise to the habits fixed by heredity. And from heredity, combined with the tendency towards the best, there can arise from generation to generation, as Lamarck and Darwin have indicated, increasingly more perfect species.25 The generations succeed each other following a procedure that they must employ if the generative power is the soul,26 that is to say a generous, divine or – to speak with Aristotle – demonic nature that gives by offering itself up.27 The generative force, indeed, is concentrated at first in a germ, in minimal dimensions, then, under a fertilizing influence in which it is perhaps split, it breaks out and divides itself in order to grow from the environment that surrounds it, and thus unfolds itself into a new unity similar to that from which it descended.28 It behaves like the free soul whose disposition it is to be incarnated and incorporated in order to dilate. What then is more plausible than to believe that this is, indeed, the method and law of nature? This law is the sacrifice of the present to the benefit of the future, death for life. Each creature, as Leonardo da Vinci said, hopes for his death. But this is in order to be resurrected in another. In this other it is produced at first in a reduced size, in a state of envelopment and homogeneous concentration almost without perceptible properties, then it is divided, and moves, by ramifications in which it appears almost to lose itself, into a new unity in which all its perfections reappear. This is a spontaneous sacrifice that gives rise, as in the Gospel histories, to a new and glorious life. This is the history whose most striking exemplar is that of the chrysalis and the butterfly, such as the profound naturalist Swammerdam recounted it, a history whose principal traits are to be found in every animal. What the heart of the hero felt, what religions teach in a poetic and prophetic language, is what the soul displays in its inner life, what nature displays in its sensible phenomena. Nature would thus be the history of the soul, a history continued and realized by humanity and its art. And so the world is explained as a progressive revelation of the creative divinity and the soul – its image and its interpreter. Et verbum erat Deus et omnia per ipsum facta sunt.29

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The formula of this revelation is the following: the soul, the active principle, collects itself in the germs within each of which its formative virtue is concentrated and encysted. Its essential unity is divided in order to constitute in each generation a polarization into two sexes that are unified by marriage and reconstituted by the influence of love into a new unity. At the same time as a constant tendency towards perfection, not, as has been said, just by the division of the work between the organs, but by the coordination of their actions that this division makes possible – from this tendency to perfection the advent of the human species is finally achieved, the image of the soul and divinity and, in it, that of perfect beauty, by which all is completed. But if life tends to attain as much perfection as possible, it is thanks to perfection itself. Shocks and friction can explain how in the long run – angles and edges are softened – more softness would everywhere result from them, but they cannot explain a genuinely aesthetic progress. Such progress, linked moreover to an increase in instability, in other words, in freedom, can have only a pre-existent perfection for its cause. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has said that nature seemed from the beginning to tend towards the formation of man and that as soon as the environmental state permitted it, nature created him. At the same time, nature tended towards beauty. In every species, each individual attains in the perfection of its organization, at least in the external forms, all the beauty of which it is capable. And we find, without knowing the reason for it, that this beauty is the highest possible, so that we cannot imagine any change that would not be detrimental to it. Humanity is, therefore, the aesthetic measure as well as the scientific measure of all things. If humanity is the end towards which all nature has always tended, this entails, given that the end expresses the principle, that in reality it is through humanity that everything began. How? We do not know, and perhaps we will never know. A singular clue is found in a fact, as reported by Secrétan, revealed by an eminent palaeontologist to whose works Secrétan alluded in the preface of his treatise on Liberty: in the primitive races of animals, before the apparition of man, there were, in their conformation and instincts, more human traits than in those that followed. At the beginning, as Anaxagoras said long ago, everything was together; the intellect came and unravelled everything. In the ancient races, humanity existed potentially, in a confused state of envelopment; once released from the chaos, it left the animals to their inferiority. In a similar way, we see the animals and particularly the closest neighbours of man, the quadrumanes, exhibit semi-human dispositions in their first years that then disappear. It appears that nature, or, more precisely, the universal soul, at each parturition – at least in the highest degrees of animality – makes, in order to attain its ultimate goal, an effort superior to the immediate result that it can attain in order to renew its endeavours. This is also, it seems, a phenomenon similar to that of promises, which are



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not immediately followed by an effect, but which seem to have to realize themselves in a more distant future. Childhood, above all in man, is an ordinary example of this. And this is why it was possible to say: ‘become like little children’. In inferior species, the being is divided and propagated with a prodigious abundance barely after being born. In superior species, the reproduction is preceded by a long embryonic preparation; life is hidden in a cyst or an egg that envelops it. The preparation or incubation includes a sequence of metamorphoses in which the being traverses the states that recall the succession of anterior degrees of organization, as if the generative force commemorates itself in order to do better now what it has done in the past. The law of the increasing duration of the preliminary and hidden life is what Carus has called the law of mystery, the one today named the law of embryo-genetic acceleration, and which perhaps could be more clearly named the law of the progress of the latent embryo-genetic education. Whatever the case may be, the result is that the progress of the species consists in nature approaching its goal, which is the creation of the most perfect species, the image most resembling its prototype, by a succession of less and less hasty childbirths, a succession of childbirths less and less comparable to abortions.30 At each degree of ascension, the development is stopped in one way or another; this gives rise to disproportions or monstrosities; every monstrosity, Geoffroy SaintHilaire said, results from an arrested development.31 However, along the way in the creative ascent, and at each stop, the harm is repaired at least partially by what Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called the balance of the organs, and which could be more clearly named the law of the reestablishment of equilibrium and compensation. It is as if nature, aiming at the summit, had amassed a determinate sum of means in order to attain it. Once arrested here, it develops so as to repair as much of the damage as is possible. Nature, by aiming at humanity, operates according to a fundamental plan that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called the unity of organic composition, and reality offers modifications of it that do not make it disappear, but rather underline its essential aspects. In the human figure, for example, the body branches out into four limbs, each armed with five extremities appropriate to the diverse needs of the maintenance of life, needs that differ according to the environment. As arrested in birds, the formation of these members is replaced by fins and wings in which its constitutive elements, diversely sketched, are visible. And, instead of inhibited beauties, similar beauties likewise appear at similar times. Among fish and birds themselves, there are compensative variations, comparable counterbalancing. The universe is like a piece of music in which the essential motif appears and disappears in order to reappear and emerge finally, triumphant, from a sequence of modulations of partial beauties in which its influence is still felt. Now, creative action appears not so much in the forms as in the movements for which the forms are made, not so much by beauty as by grace, the grace that a poet

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has said is more beautiful than beauty. The Greeks said what Vitruvius repeated when applying it to architecture: beauty has two parts, symmetry and eurhythmy, and the latter is superior to the former. Symmetry is the correspondence of the parts making them commensurable with each other, for this is the sense of the word. Of all beings, man is the one in which the symmetry is most perfect, its parts being the most proportionate to each other and to the whole. It is in him, for example, that the different limbs have the dimension and the force that best responds to the dimensions and force both of the body and the head. But symmetry is not sufficient for beauty. Plotinus, whose life reflects movement, said that more is necessary. Movement is grasped through time and number. This is what the word eurhythmy says. Rhythm is number, and eu], or good, signifying that it is something grasped by sentiment rather than by judgement. The movement that makes good and that is appreciated by sensibility is grace. Life, number, grace are what truly constitute, by perfecting it, beauty. And this is what nature displays in the human figure more than anywhere else. Grace emerges from sentiment and expresses it. It most particularly expresses the feelings of the highest order, which are the benevolent affections, manifestations par excellence of the divine nature. It expresses them especially in the movements that Leonardo da Vinci calls the divine movements, moti divini, such as the countenances in his paintings, in his Christ, his Madonna, his Saint John. Such as, above all, those in the compositions of Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Correggio, and in the intimacy of Rubens, Rembrandt, Murillo. And the general formula for these movements is, we could say, abandonment or condescendence. The creative principle, with the lines through which it is embodied, spreads out, like a spring that pours out into every part of the whole, and transforms itself there so as to be reborn even more worthy of admiration and love.32 There is a single element underlying all this. This element is the pulse, the movement belonging to the heart, by which, in the immobile egg, it announces, in a sacred moment, its existence. The pulse is the elevation and diminution, sursum and deorsum, otherwise called awakening and sleep, life and death.33 An expression of it is to be found in the vibrations attributed to light, another more obvious one is to be found in the undulations of waves, another in the movement of animals, especially of the snake that, having organs only potentially, transports itself by alternative movements, and by a sinuous succession, in its whole body; movements that are still perceptible, although half-concealed, in human walking, the only animal movement capable of complete grace. The law extends from movement to forms. Every form, Michelangelo has said, is serpentine, and the serpentine movement is different according to different conformations and instincts. Observe, Leonardo da Vinci says, the serpentine movement of all things34. In other words, observe in everything, if you want to know and represent it well, the type of grace belonging to it.



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Let us add: this will be the way to learn to be able to express nature and the degree of goodness or even divinity which is its source.35 This is how the immense poem of creation is developed. This is how nature moves in its highest parts, which the others imitate, in an unfurling of fecund undulations. God becomes tangible to the heart in grace. Nature (as we have just seen) is produced from a movement of lowering followed by recovery, that is, in sum, of undulation. This is the movement that method reproduces. Science, in order to understand nature, must follow in its path. Its method should not consist solely, as is so often said, even principally, in collecting the facts and ascertaining their order in order to predict and reproduce them. The true method, Leibniz says, is addressed to causes, knowing that they are transformed in their effects in order to reappear after the metamorphoses of the latter. The method, therefore, will follow nature in both its contraction and expansion; it will also follow it in its ultimate flourishing, the goal of all nutrition and growth. It will, in the end, establish the harmony, the continuity that is completed by gentleness, beauty and grace, and it will make of history, in the final analysis, a poem, a poem to be placed, with even more justification than the one by the Epicurean Lucretius, under the evocation of the goddess of beauty, peace and love. The method that must be followed in order to know nature well can be deduced from its constitution. To rely upon the appearances to which the most widespread opinions are attached, one should begin with the details, and from the details pass gradually to the ensembles. This is the procedure that Descartes seems to prescribe in the Discourse on Method. Was Leibniz therefore wrong to say: we must seek what is supreme in any genus, or did he want to say that only of the end and not of the beginning? In organized beings at least, which are the ends that all the rest are related to, where are we to find the parts? The parts are already wholes subordinate to a more comprehensive whole. It is by a reasoned division, not by accidental breaks, that they are determined. A good carver, Plato says, breaks nothing, but carves at the joints. First of all, therefore, a view of the whole, which then presides over the divisions. If the authors who discuss method have not made express mention of it, this does not prevent it from being the necessary starting point. The hand is the hand only by relation to the organized whole for which it exists. This is not all. In order to know an object well it is necessary, Plato says, to consider it wherever it is most beautiful. And it is, indeed, in its most beautiful examples that nature best displays what it tends towards, and that all its parts best display their significance. Aesthetics, therefore, is the torch of science. And if this is the case in the superior sciences neighbouring the moral sciences that take organized beings as their objects, it is in a similar manner that the sciences related to the sphere that we call cosmological also proceed: chemistry, physics, mathematics even, which, following a remark made by Descartes, then by Chasles, is related to

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order no less than to quantity, and in which, consequently, Aristotle was able to say with reason that beauty still has its share. Even in these dark regions, it is from its light that anything clear within them derives, and in the laws of the body we recognize those of the mind. Art teaches what science teaches but with even more force. Although, science can, when pushed to the point where it borders on philosophy, make us recognize the apparition of beauty, the presence of the action of the soul, beauty is nevertheless the proper and exclusive object of art. If science belongs to aesthetics, all the more so in having greater objects, then the same a fortiori applies to art, since its very purpose is to realize beauty and grace; and a fortiori it will also be obligatory for art, even more than science, to clarify the method and to trace out its pathways. Art has the reproduction of life for its object: spirantia aera, vivos de marmore vultus, Virgil says.36 Aristotle has called poetry an imitation of nature, but he added: it does not so much imitate nature as it is but rather as it ought to be. We could also say in the same sense, borrowing an expression from Spinoza: it imitates not so much nature natured as nature naturing; or, better, not so much the work as the design; or, finally, not so much the body as the soul. The perfection towards which nature tends is always more or less hindered: art eliminates the obstacles in order to show the tendency, the will of nature, in a state of purity; that is, instead of reality with its inevitable imperfections, it shows us the ideal and absolute truth. This is why Aristotle says that poetry is more philosophical and serious than history, since history says what is, poetry what ought to be. Therefore, art only puts the fundamental law of life and organization into a more lively light. Thereby it realizes beauty in its works. It realizes beauty by impressing on its works the characteristic that everything seems to be the effect of a reciprocal love of the whole and its parts, the culminating point of felicity; felicity consisting, following Leibniz’s definition, in finding one’s happiness in the happiness of others, its maximum is found where the other is the same differently, which is the divine nature. Being disposed to find one’s happiness in others is therefore to imitate divine life. Thereby, if art cannot surpass nor even equal nature in the constitution of things, at least it suggests the idea of a perfection without deficiency, and it thereby carries thought to a greater height than it would otherwise attain. It fixes, moreover, and perpetuates what is transitory in nature. If the religions first worshipped ‘the Eternal’ and the ‘immortals’; if Plato, in seeking the Being differing both from potential and becoming, though without making this distinction clearly and remaining with the vagueness of abstraction, took permanence to be its essential character, a concern for duration was also the starting point of art.



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First, stones, either bare or lightly carved, were erected in order to perpetuate the memory of great events, especially the greatest of all, divine apparitions or theophanies. The standing stones imitated mountains, the supposed residence of the gods and gods themselves. In these stones, the gods, indeed, came to settle. Magical incantations called them there, offerings kept them there; some have been found in India with their upper parts smeared with blood, the remains of sacrifices. These were the first monuments or memorials (mnhmei=on) initiating and maintaining the memory of divine things. Later, when the gods were represented in more definite forms, and, especially by the Greeks, in the most beautiful forms of the human species, symbolizing the highest moral and intellectual virtues, it was desired that images should represent them as such. This was, with the attempts to develop through dance and music the beauties of humanity itself, the beginning of art properly speaking. Its source was in the impression made by beauty on the heart and in the corresponding desire to translate it for the senses and the imagination. The ideas, in their state of abstraction, left the soul cold and did not arouse the faculties of action. Beauty moves it and awakens love in it. An imitated object exerts on the soul, if it has beauty, especially if it has grace, a kind of magical fascination or enchantment that, in our language, the term ‘charm’ expresses. Enchantment produced a kind of rapture, a kind of ecstasy in which the soul takes leave of itself and feels itself transported into a higher realm. We want to resemble, Plato says, what we love. From then on, the more beauty and grace an object has, the more quickly we will learn to imitate it, learn the art of imitation, and thereby the art, which is the ultimate end, of invention – we can also say, according to all the above, the art of the economy, or of dispensation, or of incarnation. The method for developing a sense for art can from then on be only the imitation of what is the most beautiful. It is not, Bacon and Leibniz say, by rules, by abstract precepts that we succeed in producing beautiful things, but by considering them, by imitating them. Bacon says: we make nothing beautiful through rules, but through a species of happiness; Leibniz says: we may well possess all the rules of prosody and rhetoric, but we will not for all that produce verse as good as that of Virgil, nor orations with the force of those of Cicero. And, evidently relying on the fact that beauty is more perceptible in works of art, the result of clear choice, than in those of nature, he adds that the way to learn to produce the best verse possible is to read good poets. Then what happens happens, when, thinking of something else, we walk in the sun: we receive a kind of tincture. In order to make good music, Leibniz continues, we must familiarize ourselves with the masterpieces of the best composers, to be full of their tricks, their phrases.

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Once the imagination is equipped with such materials, we can let it go, and it will produce similar things, by a sort of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, that is, in the language of the time, possession by a divine principle which transports and inspires. It is the happiness of which Bacon speaks. The painter Parrhasius, in one of Xenophon’s dialogues, says to Socrates who interrogates him on painting: there exist in our art indeed many things that can be learnt; but as for the best, the gods have reserved its secret. This ‘best’ is what only the gods communicate to the soul.37 Raphael wrote in a figure of Poetry: numine afflatur.38 Plato says that no one knocks at the door of the Muses while maintaining their composure.39 And the poets of antiquity invoke the Muses so that the latter can dictate the verse to them, or rather so that the Muses can sing their verse in their place. These are so many expressions of the thought, more or less conscious of itself, that nothing beautiful can come from the understanding or from calculation alone, but only from something richer and more profound, the genius or the divine sleeping in us, that beauty reawakens. Those who say this are among the first philosophers. The greatest of the ancient philosophers express themselves almost like poets. Descartes believed that he owed the highest truths he found to divine inspiration and made a vow, according to which he acted, to go and give thanks in a revered shrine. Pascal kept the vivid memory of a moment of grace from above in which the supreme truth – probably that only the heart can teach principles – had appeared to him radiantly; he wrote a recollection of it on a piece of paper that he always carried on him in the lining of his clothing and which bore these words: fire, fire and light, rapture, happiness. This is what has been named, so curiously, but not without some truth, the amulet of the author of Pensées.40 The production of beauty by art is therefore a mystery like all natural production, a mystery that has its own form of initiation. The initiation here is also a purification, operated by assiduous frequentation of the masterpieces of first art and then nature, a fecund union of the soul with the divine spirit. Great, therefore, was the error of those who, in this century, wanted to reduce the art of drawing, the common foundation of the plastic arts, to a species of science grounded, at least as it would appear, on geometry. It was an invention of a Swiss schoolteacher, Pestalozzi, who believed that he found the way to bring the art of drawing into the reach of the working classes. Familiar enough with the geometry to which he was inclined to have predominate in all education, he taught how to simplify the contours of things, so complicated in living beings, by reducing them to straight or circular lines. This was to alter the forms by degrading them, reducing them, in the manner of the materialists, to frail elements. It was above all to consider only the details, without understanding the whole or the principle.41 Art consists in the consideration of the whole and the principle.42 We thus see those applying the alleged method of Pestalozzi resort, in order to establish the



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whole, to a mechanical means of development that fails to employ the judgement in which, as Michelangelo said, all drawing consists; and to fail to employ it is to cause it to be irremediably obliterated. In order to execute a determinate work with more facility and exactness, wrote Leonardo da Vinci, we could resort to mechanical means of measuring. But those who use it in the course of their apprenticeship destroy their own genius. According to the ancient adage, it is by forging that we become a blacksmith. The only method, therefore, by which we could learn art is the one through which we exercise it, and to which, as we have seen, even that of science, in essence, is reducible: to start from the simple, that is, not from the detail that exists in the organism only through the end that it serves, but from this end. We must, as Horace said and as all the greats say with him, posit at first the whole.43 In positing it, he adds, we must attempt to grasp the simple principle of which it is the effect and expression. The method followed and recommended by all the masters of art is to posit first of all the whole in attempting to discover its principle, and then to descend gradually by a progressive division, from the ensemble to the details, without losing sight of the whole for an instant. The result of this work, in which unity and plurality go together, is that the generative unity and the way in which it is incarnated and distributed in the different parts permeates inner sense. A beautiful model, as we have seen, is one where the whole and the parts seem permeated by a reciprocal love, and is all the more beautiful as their union appears more spontaneous. In nature, the character of organized beings is such that their members are in a relative independence with regard to the whole; and if in more perfect organisms the solidarity is greater than in the others, the limbs, in contrast, are freer. This is what we see in man compared to other living beings. It is the same in a work of art, whether the members, says Leonardo, are fluid (sciolti), or loose (snodati). And it is, indeed, a constant precept that two parts of one limb should never be assembled in a straight line, and that the articulations should be as mobile as possible. A figure representing a living being of normal proportions must offer thus the aspect of a perfect freedom, and thereby testify to the liberality of its principle. Otherwise, there is no grace and no charm. The method will be progressive if it is applied to the reproduction of increasingly complicated models. Let us add that geometry will have its place within it, but through the employment of perspective, in order to reduce to scientific principles the alterations of forms that result from optical laws, and to facilitate their comprehension. For the forms themselves and the movements, knowledge of them must also precede the employment of the method strictly speaking, since this consists in the imitation of the models; it will help – and such is, says Leonardo, the utility that science has for art – to distinguish the possible from the impossible.44

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The method of art properly speaking consists in the imitation of models, and not, as in geometric tracing, in a construction by rules. This is what those who gave to drawing in art the denomination of imitative drawing understood. It began, following the custom of past masters, one vainly repudiated by some second-order artists of whom the most considerable was Benvenuto Cellini, by first defining the parts of the human figure in which the soul is most visible, and which serve best the expression of the parts that the supposed Pestalozzian or geometric method saves for the end, namely the eyes and the mouth. Michelangelo, again, makes a formal prescription of this. After this preparation, and addressing the whole figure, the apprentice drawer will seek it, first, – following the path of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and above all the Greek artists – in the serpentine lines characteristic of the movements, and, second, in the forms. He will seek it especially in the figures of the kind that Leonardo calls divine. He will learn in this way to see, in his own manner, everything in God, as Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz want us to. Music does not imitate corporeal forms, like the arts of design do, but rather the accents that the sentiments of the soul give to the voice. Its laws are no less analogous to those of the arts. Very briefly, a piece of music is like the dismemberment of a fundamental theme into parts in which its identity is maintained under diverse modifications. Its archetype is the fugue, in which the theme seems alternately to flee, to search for itself, to lose itself and to find itself. Everywhere a diversity in which what was contained virtually in the motif passes into actuality, and in the whole development, on the basis of the whole development, there is a division between a design expressing the principal idea, and a lower one that accompanies it like a kind of echo. In this way, the reflections returned by the background accompany the light and principal colours, modifying the latter by being mixed with them. In musical development, like in that of figures, the law is a perpetual union of harmonious contraries, which finds its highest formula in sexual and creative union. Above the figurative arts, above the liberal arts themselves, thus named because they must be superior to any servile interest, there is what the Stoics called the art of life and that we commonly name morality; a superior art, for it has for its object a beauty higher still than that of the human body, namely that of the soul.45 The most important part of plastic art is to form, as Leonardo da Vinci says, images of the soul. The art of life fashions the soul. It is therefore the highest art of all. It is here, therefore, that the effective methods should appear in their highest degree of purity. Morality must be the rule of conduct and, consequently, of will. This rule, even more than in the plastic arts or rhetoric, is unity. Life should, the Stoics say, conform to itself. Wisdom shows itself in constancy.46 But this must be constancy in the good. Now what was the good? The common people, with Epicurus, see it in the pleasure that analysis ultimately reduces to the cessation of pain, a negative result like that of the theory for which the principles of



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things were simple atoms without any quality. Nihilism in morality like in physics, nihilism thus in theology, since the Epicurean gods were without will as they were without power, idle and indifferent in the voids separating the worlds. For the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the good, the goal of life, was beauty (for the Latins: honestas). But the Stoics excluded compassion as a weakness. For Zeno and his disciples, as later for Kant, every passion was weakness and sickness. This was to deviate from the ancient wisdom of the heroes that Buddhism, like Christianity, came to re-establish. On vases placed near the dead, next to the images representing the dead person, the word kalo/j, beauty, was often inscribed, apparently as a kind of acclamation, like the invocation: xrhste/ or xrhsth\, which assimilates them to the gods. It was the same with the word eu0daimoni/a, a word that, like the epithet ma&karej, really signified felicity joined to divine perfection. In earthly life, like in the one that will succeed it according to general belief, resembling the gods was the law and ideal. Now if, as we have seen, the gods were essentially benevolent and beneficent, this was the thought to which, for the high philosophy, the great art of life, morality must finally be reduced. Goodness, or excellence that makes utility,47 must little by little resolve itself into benevolence or, taking precedence over any other, the desire for the goodness of others, which is – as Leibniz said, in order to end controversy about love, and as Descartes had said in his theory of friendship – the definition of love. How should we achieve this state of constant generosity? Even more than for the fine arts, it is true for the art of life that we do not reach this goal by what Leibniz calls the dryness of precepts, but by imitation. It is not so much a question of communicating a good theory to the understanding as one of giving a good impulsion to the affections, to sensibility, to the will, which operates by the contagious force of reality and life. ‘Consider’, says Horace, ‘an exemplar of life and of morals and draw from it, learned imitator, the living words’, that is, those that arouse life in you. This is what will make in the art of morality, more than in any other art, the impression that you receive from beauty. In the art of life the contagion of the example will be more powerful than in any other, exercising itself in the depths of being, from soul to soul, from will to will, and the will having its most intimate root in what in us has the most force and efficacy, namely love. According to Kant, who thought that we could know nothing save sensible phenomena, to found morality on an idea of the good was an impossible thing. There were obligatory things, this was all that consciousness could know; to do these things was the object of an absolute commandment without any condition, or, in his language, a categorical imperative.48 In his antipathy for any species of sensibility,49 he was careful not to ask love for the secret of life. Kant attributed to experience only an inferior role, that of furnishing the materials to the thought giving form to them.

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He also denied, following Hume, even more resolutely, any fundamental knowledge of the soul by the soul itself. He equally turned away from – as something uniquely pathological, that is, abnormal and unhealthy – any given of sensibility. Descartes was better able to understand, as being at the route of the intellect and the will, sentiment and love. There was, according to him, nothing great in the soul without great passions, and he said: ‘I value friendship so highly that I believe that those who die for what they love are happy until their final moment.’ Consequently, he was a noble soul making little of the great evils that he had to suffer and much more of the very small ones that others had to suffer. This was, it seems, to go beyond what Christianity demands, which commands that we love others as we love ourselves; but it is fundamentally the same spirit of both Christianity and heroism, and ultimately whoever loves thus, loves truly. The Gospel had said: ‘You will love God with all your soul and your neighbour as yourself.’ But can love be commanded? In other words, is it in our power? The solution to this difficulty is that love depends on us, that it is natural to us and that it would prevail in us without the impediments that it is incumbent on us to overcome. This can also be deduced from this celebrated sentence by Tertullian: ‘The soul is naturally Christian’, and from this equivalent phrase by Bossuet: ‘When God formed the entrails of man, the first thing he placed there was goodness.’ In other, less figurative terms, we can say: love is the foundation of our being. The child would learn this, moreover, if it were something learnt, from the smile of his mother; about which the poet said: Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.50 At the same time, with the capacity of reflecting on itself belonging to the will as well as to the intellect, idolatry, the cult of the self is born which vies with love for the heart of man.51 This is the radical evil on which Kant and the Germanic theology has spoken. Extricating ourselves from it depends on us, and, as soon as this weed is uprooted, love comes to reign. We are in the world for no other reason than to love, Pascal said. Pascal added that we are part of a whole that is humanity, and that in an organized whole each part behaves as if it exists only for the whole. If it did not express itself on this subject with the same clarity, Christianity said finally: ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’, a figure of similar sense and scope. Each branch tends from its particular life towards the total life of the vine as being the life that it loves. And the soul, Saint Augustine will say, lives more when it loves than when it animates. And this is how anyone who loves truly feels, a father, a mother, a lover. Morality, the art of life, is reducible, in sum, to the teaching of life such as human nature would want it in its original truth. The initiates in the mysteries of Eleusis sing: ‘I have escaped evil and found goodness.’ This was the evil that Christianity revealed by saying: ‘Who seeks his soul shall lose it.’



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This is a revelation in terms still obscure, but it is clarified by another phrase inviting us to cast aside the mirror-image that provides an obstacle to our true and superior personality: ‘Be simple like a dove.’ Another saying concerning simplicity has the same sense: ‘Whoever does not resemble these children will not enter the celestial kingdom.’ Plotinus said: ‘Simplify yourself.’ He believed that he could draw all of morality from this sole precept. Plurality, indeed, was the inferior element for Platonism, a source of all the evils that they identified with matter. The simple, the One, is God. To simplify oneself was for the soul to return to the first and supreme principle, to return into it. In the Eleusinian mysteries, purification or simplification was the first moment. The second was the vision of the gods, commerce with them. It is the same in the Christian religion. Baptism to which penitence was joined from the beginning, and the sacrament, or preparatory mystery destined to symbolize the purification of the faithful, the Eucharist, put them into immediate communication with the Saviour. The soul delivered from evil was prepared for the supreme good. The Eucharist itself was still, besides, merely a preliminary. The good, the final end of all religious and moral life, was, like the final period of the Attic mysteries, a union of a conjugal nature with the divinity, a union that was named a sacred marriage. The prototype for this is to be found in the stories of heroes of old. In the development of morality, philosophy reproduced these legendary themes. Morality, such as the laws maintain it, does not entirely consist, as the text of nine of the ten biblical commandments seems to say, to do no harm to one’s neighbour, to not deprive him of what belongs to him; after that it remains to use both what we have and what we are ourselves.52 This is the Morality of the saviour heroes, before the Saviour, the morality of generosity, a morality that does not wholly consist in abstinence, but which is gift and grace, liberality and magnanimity, the morality that Descartes indicated in some remarks where he appeared to go beyond Christianity itself, and which is only the strongest expression of the latter, one dictated by the ancient spirit of heroism and by the spirit of modern chivalry.53 In the rites of knighthood – an initiation, created in France, to a royal and thus eminently generous life, of which the prince must offer the most perfect example –, in the ceremonial, a bath, a white dress represented above all, as in baptism, purity. Rather die than be defiled. All life, afterwards, must be disinterested, a matter of abnegation, sacrifice for the weak. And this was only the model of normal life, a duty, in reality, for all, duty and at the same time happiness, the coronation of duty fulfilled. Indeed, the nature of love, as Descartes understood it, is such that sacrifice, far from being sadness, is joy. To give, the Gospel says, is better than to receive. It is the motto of he who loves truly.

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To all the preceding the following line of Augustine is the corollary: ‘Love and do what you want’, a dictum that means not: if you love you can do things foreign and even contrary to love with impunity, but instead: whoever loves truly will do nothing but what love inspires. From love only virtue is born.54 This also is the sense of the enigmatic words addressed by Christ to the Samaritan who had come to seek water in a well: ‘I can, myself, give such water to you that he who drinks it will be thirsty no more for the rest of Eternity.’ The great religions are reducible to this moral. Its source is the primitive universal revelation that is the heart. Such is the origin of the light that illuminates every man coming into this world, but which illuminates great souls especially. The principal task of philosophy is to eliminate everything that obscures it, and before that, to eliminate everything that smothers the heat from where the light proceeds. I have come, Jesus Christ said, the new Prometheus and the new Orpheus, to cast fire on this earth, and would that it were already kindled! This desire is a call for the reign of the spirit that Christ announces as the One to whom it was reserved, in the end, to announce, without enigma and anything figurative, all truth. Descartes, Pascal, inheritors of what there was best in the wisdom as well as in the soul of the heroes of all time, have come to renew the divine promise by explaining it and by preparing for its realization. Thus the divinity will be adored no longer in Gerizim or in Jerusalem, or in Rome, but in spirit and in truth. Inspired by this moral, the human soul becomes aware that it is not born to perish after having lived for short instants in a single point of the world, but that it comes from the infinite. It is not, following a line of Descartes, like those small vases that three drops of water fill, but rather nothing suffices for it except the infinite. A ray of divinity, nothing else can be its destiny than returning to it and uniting itself forever with its immortality. The attempt has been made, in the name of justice, to reduce it to a more humble destiny. Though the Saviour in the Gospel said: ‘I have compassion for the crowd’; though the Gospel says further: ‘forgive up to seven times, up to seventy times a day’; though a Catholic service for the dead says to God: ‘You whose nature it is to have compassion always and to forgive’, a narrow theology wants him to despair of most men and condemn them, as incapable of amendment, to perish forever. In the name of justice, a theology foreign to the spirit of mercy that belongs to Christianity, abusing the name of eternity that often signifies only a long duration, condemns sinners who have died without repenting, that is, almost the whole of humanity, to never-ending pain. How should we understand what becomes of the felicity of a God who would hear all these moaning voices for eternity? According to others, God – despairing of the irreconcilable sinners but unable to order eternal torment – damns them to utter annihilation. But this hypothesis of irreconcilability is one of these fictions that is authorized only by an abstract spirit



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that creates absolute types in suppressing the differences in degree that generally characterize realities, and that relates them back to God, alone without limits in his mercy. In the country where Christianity was born at the end of pagan antiquity, there is a common allegorical fable inspired by a completely different thought, the fable of Eros and Psyche or the soul. Eros becomes enamoured with Psyche. The latter is guilty, like Eve in the Bible, of an impious desire to want, otherwise than through God, to discern good from evil, so as to deny thus divine grace. Eros imposes expiatory penalties on her, but in order to make her worthy again of his choice, and he does not impose them without regret. A bas-relief represents him with a butterfly (love and the butterfly were always synonymous as symbolic of the resurrection) in one hand, while with the other he burns it with the flame of his candle, but he turns his head, as if he were full of compassion. We see, without need of explanation, what thought this representation translates. It seems to conform, more than the ordinary doctrines of the eternity of pains and of conditional immortality, to the lenient spirit of the Gospel. Perfection is a reason for being, said Bossuet. Since it was claimed at the time of Aristotle that the good and the beautiful were tardy and transitory things, he said: why does God endure if not because his state is goodness? But, as we have seen, goodness, as beauty par excellence, is love. This state is also that of the soul. Love is therefore immortality. Its association with the body is a diminution of existence. Freed from the body, it will therefore have only reasons to be. Our pestiferous bodies weigh us down, Virgil said. When delivered from them by death, it is hoped that the soul will fly with a lighter wing to the celestial regions. As the Platonists believe, as its appears that Leibniz also believes, this will assuredly not be without conserving, by mean of the most subtle part of its organization (visible or invisible light and even electricity), its relations, either past or future, with the physical world. But perhaps this will no longer be in a state of absolute separation that posits insuperable limits between different beings. We will be much closer to each other in a profound unity of substance and action. The Platonists represent the ideas of which the intelligible world is composed as being such that in each all the others are visible. Perhaps the same will apply in souls: they will be penetrable by and to each other, open also to each other, quite the opposite to the separatism of the present time. At the highest point of the vital architectonic, in man, the mind soars, so to speak, above the organism; it apprehends itself in the objects of its thought; it apprehends itself above all in itself, it sees in it, in an inner consciousness, thought in front of thought, such as it will already be, higher still, in God, where, following Aristotle’s bold formula, thought is thought of thought, a pure flame that clarifies itself with its own light. Is this union of a soul with itself perhaps a prelude to another state where

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the different souls, permeating each other in intimacy, as we see in many an example of this world, will realize the ideal of perfect conjugal union? At the very least, we have to see in it a sketch of a still more perfect union of souls with divinity, their origin and common centre; a union predicted in the Gospel as consummating one day the identification of the divine Saviour and his faithful disciples. If, therefore, there are reasons to believe that in a future life the intellectual faculties will be expanded, there are also reasons to believe that, after the experience of earthly life and the passage to a new life that sheds different light on the former, this will especially apply to the moral faculties, and the society formed by humanity and divinity will be bound with more numerous and stronger ties; there is reason to believe, finally, that once arrived in the new life, about which we cannot have distinct and detailed ideas, humans will not forget the companions remaining after them or those still to be born in the earthly sphere. The heroes, the old Hesiod said, look out from their eternal abode for the wellbeing of mortals. This is an idea that has taken its place among the Christian hopes. Detachment from God, return to God, the closure of a great cosmic circle, restitution of the universal equilibrium – such is the story of the world. The heroic philosophy does not build the world with mathematical and logical unities, and from the abstractions understanding detaches from reality; it attains, by the heart, the lively living reality, the moving soul, spirit of fire and light.

Notes 1.

The hero leader of people, following the Homeric expression, a name often used in the plural, was ready to think big in every respect. He extended his care to a great number, and was always ready to give up for others what belonged to him. In great souls, Descartes said, liberality knows no measure. It was therefore natural for the hero to extend his thoughts to what the same Descartes posited most frequently as the characteristic attribute of God, namely immensity. The only philosophy that could one day answer to this way of thinking had to be the one that Descartes and Pascal began, the one that in everything advances towards the infinite.   Without yet philosophizing, the hero of former times still learned from his heart what greatness was, and that it consisted in rising above oneself and thus the universe by a sacrifice, without reserve, of anything that he had and of everything that he was. 2. Heroes such as the Greeks, for example, represented them, see the world, a divine work, invested with a beauty that pernicious monsters defiled. Their destiny was to purge the earth of these monsters: thus they had to complete the divine work (later, this is the purpose of art, morality, politics). Thus, they are purifiers, liberators. It is a redemptive task; the object of Apollo’s paean and temple



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bas-reliefs. It is the struggle of Apollo against Python, and then of Hercules, Theseus and Perseus against the wild beasts, the Minotaur, the Gorgons, a struggle continued by the Greeks on the bas-reliefs of their temples, against the Centaurs, the Amazons; the struggle of Hellenism against Barbarism, and whose outcome must be the triumph of gentleness over ferocity; a triumph represented by the legend either of Orpheus, priest of Apollo – who with his lyre caused the trees, rocks, and the ferocious animals to follow him – or of Bacchus, who substituted for a bloody-minded drunkenness a gentler intoxication, inspiring greater thoughts. Bacchus is represented on many monuments, on a chariot with his wife Arianne, surrounded by Satyrs and Maenads, dragged by the Centaurs. 3. This is the name that Christianity will give to the Spirit that enlightens and vivifies; it will call it not only that which gives, but the given. 4. And in Christianity, the Saviour, on the point of dying for his people, gives them his flesh for food and blood for drink. This was also the thought behind the Christian Eucharist that the substance supposed to prepare the life of creatures for immortality was nothing other than the Creator. And this substance was ultimately nothing other than love, whose nature it is to give. 5. It was as if the homage was to the superior gods invoked by the stranger, and who were honoured especially by the shepherds of peoples, these gods who, being strangers to the hereditary hatreds of families and tribes, extended a paternal protection to all humanity, and willingly accorded to the unfortunate their principal blessings. 6. From the beginning, the elite had an awareness of having within them a will by which they were able to make themselves independent of circumstances. They readily believed that they found a similar force in other men and something analogous in all beings. They believed that this force is the same as that which maintains life through respiration and gave names to it that signify wind and breath (pneu~ma in Greek, animus and anima in Latin); âme in the French language is derived from this noun in Latin. For many thinkers in high antiquity, all souls, although each had their own, were formed from one alone. In addition, for many the universal soul was a superior divinity on which the entire world depended.   Aspiring to the infinite and perfection, it was natural for them to believe in it. They wanted, they hoped for immensity and eternity. The immensity and eternity not so much of things but of immortal souls. In sum, a universe filled, as Thales and Pythagoras say, with both gods and souls; benevolent gods, immortal souls.   Two kinds of monument attest to these beliefs: the temple and the tomb. The temple rising above, at least at first, elevated sites and proclaiming in this way divine sovereignty as extending far into the distance; the tomb, not as today’s materialist archaeology all too frequently imagines it, as decorated not with memories of earthly life as a testimony of hopeless regrets, but rather with symbols of a living faith in a life to come, a life gentler and more brilliant.   In a general way, the funeral rites are inspired by the heroic belief in a future and rather happy life in the society of gods.

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7.

These so different beliefs in the two different kinds of man gave rise to the beginnings of quite contrary philosophies, the one tending to division, the other to union; the former, following Leibniz’s expressions, dispersing, the latter concentrating, the one dispersing into atoms, the other concentrating into fecund and radiating unities. This is the Discord and Friendship of Empedocles, Mars and Venus, Hate and Love, Envy and Liberality.   The former willingly represent the first elements as impenetrable solids limited, so to speak, to a narrow individuality; the latter represent them as subtle vapours whose nature it is to spread and easily insinuate itself everywhere. 8. No one has extended the use of the faculty of abstraction further than Hume. He posited as a principle that everything that could be considered as being apart was really apart. Therefore, all modes were erected as distinct entities without links to each other. Others had already conceived the world as having separate, indivisible corpuscles or atoms for its elements. Hume reduced it to a dust of ideas. This was only to push to the extreme the system that conferred to simple attributes the existence that was proper to substances alone, a system to which any philosophy is reduced that, as several philosophers have done in our time, denies substance, and from which a universal phenomenalism results (Lachelier, Renouvier and Boutroux claim that Leibniz only really believed in relations).  Schelling has remarked that Hegel attributes a sort of personal spontaneity to his ideas, with which he composes all things, in order to explain their progressive transformations, a sort of personal spontaneity. In the same way, every idealist attributes to ideas, things without life, Leibniz says, an active role that only belongs to souls. Such was always the result of the illusion by which the understanding, after having formed abstractions and given them names, makes of them so many distinct individualities. 9. For this same illusion the principle seems to consist in reducing knowledge of things and their principles solely to the intellect which, thus isolated by abstraction, has no criterion to distinguish what is real from what is not, this criterion being found only in the total action of the soul, intellect and will combined.   This is what Aristotle understood.   The real is not what is merely conceived, but what we genuinely know, that is, that of which we have an experience through, for example, touch or sight; the mere idea is a potential knowledge, experience is actual knowledge; such as touch and sight, and even better the superior kind of touch and vision that the intellect has in its inner awareness of itself: it touches and thinks, Aristotle says. This is the true science of which any other is an imperfect imitation. True science is thus the one in which the subject is identical to the object, a thing that, like any identification of opposites, is repugnant to the mere understanding but that is verified, once again by experience. 10. And it is here that it appears, although Aristotle himself does not make express mention of it, that the source from which this assertion emanates is the inner consciousness of effort or the will, which, even if Aristotle does not formally



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invoke it in his Metaphysics, already plays a completely different role in his philosophical system as a whole than in Plato’s. Like Socrates, Plato takes little account of human freedom; thus both are inclined to make virtue consist entirely in knowledge. It is not the same with Aristotle: and free activity has a significant role in all his philosophy. 11. While for Platonism everything depends on the ideas, things that are, Leibniz says, inert and dead, for Aristotle, as for the first philosophers, namely Thales, it is to life that everything returns, and by life that everything begins. If, indeed, life was not originally there (e0n a0rxh|~ lo/goj), how could it have appeared? In the beginning there is action, Aristotle says, everywhere, therefore in every natural series, at the beginning there is the best. This is the judgement that he opposes, by the observation of nature, to the materialists of his time with whom Platonism ended up making common cause, thus falling from the mathematical point of view to their point of view.   Let us remark that philosophy, in its history, has followed the same course as nature. In nature, in the first species, obscure life was still weak. This is why these species could subsist, amid so many causes of destruction, only thanks to the stony shells in which they hid themselves, almost immobile. Species succeeded them that were able to replace these defences with mobility. Philosophy progressed in the same way, from Plato to Aristotle. In Aristotle also, entities without movement and force have been succeeded by principles endowed with life; empty generalities (which in having only a logical existence cannot be the causes of real existence) by full individualities, so to speak, objects of immediate experience that bear witness to each other. 12. In more than one religion, the same phenomenon appears in the divinity. In Greek mythology, Jupiter gives birth alone to a goddess whose principal characteristic is wisdom and who is the personification of his thought. In the Old Testament Jehovah engenders a girl called Wisdom. In Christian theology, the Father creates a Son who is his word, and through whom he has created everything. 13. In summary, there is not only with the sensible order of nature an intelligible order that would contain its laws and abstract forms, such as the idealism of Hume and Kant conceives it (the latter admitting yet a third spiritual order, but one that we could know nothing about). There are two orders of reality (Leibniz himself calls his phenomena bene fundata), two species of substances, as Descartes had said, and these species are each reduced to a unity, the one more perfect, the other more imperfect, the second being an image or transitory figure of the first, by which the latter is made graspable by the physical senses and the imagination. In the first there is action, duration, power or force; in the second, there are the imitations of action, of its duration, of its power that are movement, time, extension; in both, although differently, there is immensity, infinity. The second is a translation into another language, and a transient translation, of the spiritual and eternal text that is the first.   If from the soul and the will that is its ground we rise even higher, if we

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approach the superior essence that is revealed in it and from which it draws its movement and its very existence (in eo volumus, movemur et sumus), we encounter there in its principle the same development that nature displays to the eyes. Without entering into an attempt to prove it, which would exceed the limits of a sketch such as this, let us content ourselves with remarking that Christian theology, expressing the ideas of the previous theologies and philosophies with a new clarity, shows us that God, already real in a personality that has the characteristic of eminently representing the productive Power, whence derives the expressive name of Father, is also expressed as the Word in which the diverse faculties that he envelops in his unity are distinguished, and finally as a third personality, the Holy Spirit revealing his very essence which is love.   Aristotle’s metaphysics, making God an intellect that has itself as its object, also shows it developing in intellectual action and grasping itself there, and if Aristotle does not explain that its nature itself is love, the time not being ripe for this conception to be developed into a philosophy, at least he explains the movement of the sky, from which all other movement is derived, by the love that this God puts into it.   Later would be developed – without doubt under the influence of Christianity, crowning the ancient beliefs that had their home in Syria, this domain of Venus and the mystical dove – the idea, also already indicated in the Greeks by Hesiod, Empedocles, Parmenides, that love, the first motor of thought, was the essence of divinity itself. 14. Thus a single and unique kind of being, forming a continuous whole – for how could we understand, there being no void, what would separate substances, with different modes, or according to the Greek expression, different turns.   Hence, in Aristotle’s works, the frequent employment, above all in the Metaphysics, of formulae such as: the same thing, with differences of being, that is to say of ways of being (e3teron tw~| ein]ai); or: the same differently (ta)uto/ e9te/roj) formulae applicable to, for example, the intelligible and the sensible compared to the soul and to the body. If he does not yet say as Leibniz will: the body is mind, Aristotle says: the soul is the action of an organic body which has life in potency, which, in other words, reunites all the conditions of life: a proposition that can be inverted into: the organic body is the soul reduced, at least for a part of itself, from action to virtuality.   This is the theory that comes to replace dualism, which the Platonic abstraction amounts to, and for which the universe, beginning with the universal soul and the infinity of particular souls that it contains, forms a single whole, born from condescendence or divine grace. 15. The law, at first divine, then universal, is, in sum, a generative principle that – being all wealth and plenitude, being all love, for this is the wealth and plenitude itself whose opposite is avaricious jealousy – is also, by consequence, all liberality. Consequently, it lowers itself spontaneously, by dividing itself into creatures, to conditions in which its splendour is veiled but where it brings with it a cause of



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new union and reconstitution. This is what the whole of nature shows and, in all its spheres, that in which its development consists. 16. If instead of remaining with the detail of the current appearance we look to the precedents and to the ground, we must immediately recognize that everything living that begins has its origin in a similar but unique living being, in an at once intimate and superior principle that proceeds without discontinuity, like a creative fluid, from one to the other.   And this is the ground of all nature. This is the difference between the profundity of the causes and the superficiality of the effects. This is the difference between the philosophy of the brain and that of the heart.   In the former beauty plays no role, but it reigns in the latter.   Let us look, as if from above, at nature, in the spheres of life, of which the others are like pale effigies: we see everywhere in it something like an elastic essence that relaxes and tightens, that disperses and brings itself back together; we see everywhere in it something similar to the Stoic theory of divine, artistic fire, in its expansion and return to itself, a principle that relaxes and tightens, disperses and re-gathers itself, in order to arrive at a definitive glorification.   In Stoicism, triumph; in the philosophy of the present and the future, rapture.   For materialism, everything proceeds randomly, emerging from chaos, and yet proceeds towards order and even beauty, but we do not know why since we fail to recognize the profound and pre-existent reason for the order and beauty. For the philosophy that goes to the ground of things, to the light that emanates from the heart, everything is explained in the movement of nature by a pre-existent love, by a prevenient grace. The latter also, the principle of life, proceeds like Pascal wants the soul to proceed, from humiliation to inspiration, to deification. Similarly, this is what was desired in the principally religious customs that provided purification as the preliminary to the supreme consecrations.   The first, preparatory phase aims to return the subject into a virgin or nascent state so that the sacred union that is its end is perfect, and so that forever unum sint.   For positivism, materialism, transformism, the history of the world, the universal history is a perpetual progress that starts from the confines of nothingness and without any principle of movement, either outside or inside of itself, raises itself by itself up to the most complicated forms of existence and finally up to thought and consciousness. The truth is completely different. The truth is the divinity lowering itself by love to the forms that both hide it and make it visible, it is the soul inspired by divinity, filled by it with the desire to pour out its goods into the world, to clothe it in splendour and glory, to intoxicate it with goodness.   The idea that the movement of nature is ascensional is one that has been dominant for some time. It is perhaps a truer idea that this movement is first abasement and then recovery, or resurrection, and even according to a formula from physics, cathode and anode: a Stoic and a Christian theory. 17. This denomination appears to indicate the idea that the multitude precedes the

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unity. And yet, it is not so. The phenomenon is much rather what we call in vegetables ‘budding’. Thus one of our most learned naturalists (Perrier) sometimes prefers to use this expression. It remains to conform the theory to it by explaining organic formations as resulting, not from a coalescence that experience does not show, but from a division of a radical unity. But it remains to assign to this division, as well as to the development that it initiates, the cause that the modern theory of evolutionism entirely omits. 18. Vulgar doctrine, admitting as real only what can, as Plato said, be seen with the eyes and touched by the hands, but which, however, cannot deny what is superior in the universe, namely thought, reduces the latter to an inexplicable accident. On the contrary, the heroic doctrine sees the principle in what is superior. Aristotle first formally proclaimed that the best was in everything first (like the Gospel has said since: at the beginning was reason, or the Word). It fell to others – distinguishing what thought, knowledge, and the will encompass – to establish that to the latter, and to the love which is its ground, belongs priority with pre-eminence, and to prepare for what should be characteristic of the modern epoch, for what we can call a philosophy of the heart.   For the vulgar doctrine (brutal philosophy), thought reduced to a modification and almost to an unhealthy degeneration of sensation, is truly only a kind of indulgence, superficiality, a game, just as has been said of art. It is also a transitory thing. Thought is like a flower of short duration. Life can have no other goal than the ephemeral enjoyment of the pleasures attached to sensuality, which rests on the fragile basis of corporeal organization. The mind is assigned to the body in order to serve it. A will-o-the-wisp on the surface of muddy water. The heroic doctrine, on the contrary, is founded on the awareness that thought has of itself. This awareness reveals to it an inner force on which movements depend; by a natural induction it extends this notion outside of its own limits, and nature appears to it as linked in all its parts by causality. Its progressive development becomes thus a figurative history of the soul, a history explained by its constitution, its inclinations, its conceptions, and that is dominated by a divine liberality. 19. From this assertion alone that the action is being itself comes a completely new philosophy, one that heroic souls sensed and founded. This philosophy will be reproduced in its essentials in Stoicism, which, however, substitutes action for tension, against Epicureanism, the inheritor of the vulgar philosophy that was inaugurated by the materialism of Democritus, adorer of slackening (a!nesij) and inertia.   Beings move by action. Beings move outside of themselves. The movement is e0n a!llw~.| The movement or change is produced by one thing in another. Thus a duality results from the very reality of the being. If it moves itself, this is by splitting itself into two distinct and opposed factors. Duality and opposition result from the simplest existence. Action is a subject for which an object is necessary. In this way, causality is constituted. Action is the cause; its effect is produced in an object.



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  How then is the movement, the effect produced? Aristotle said: the motor cause produced the movement in another; that is, the effect is produced in a different subject to the one that is the cause. However, if these expressions had to be taken literally, the cause would address only a kind of appeal, and would only awaken the motor force in another subject. And such is the common notion of final cause. To this notion seems to conform that of the prime mover at the end of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where it is represented as being for nature only an object of love towards which it tends, in such a way that it is to nature, not to divinity that the proper and real motor force would belong. And yet how could the imperfect have this force and not the perfect? Would, without God, an idea of God suffice? And can we even attribute this idea to the imperfect? Can anything other than God conceive God and aspire to him? And is it possible to believe that any of this escaped Aristotle? What he must have believed instead, whatever he actually may have actually said, is that the first motor, God arouses in the world only a love with which he first penetrates and animates it. God for that reason, according to the Christian expression, summarizing the theory of Grace, crowns his own gifts.   What our consciousness indeed witnesses is that in our effort we transport ourselves, we transfuse ourselves into what we move and come into its multiplicity, without ceasing to be ourselves, what it becomes; a mystery, doubtless, of decomposition and recomposition that defies the understanding and the imagination, but that experience reveals and certifies; a mystery that every generation reproduces in nature, in an image at once similar and dissimilar. The motor action operates thus by giving itself, by the abasement, the condescendence that is the inner wish of generous souls. At first, this is witnessed in consciousness, which is the prerogative of mind, then in the numberless echoes of nature. Our inner experience teaches us what the Middle Ages calls influxus, influence. We cannot understand the how. For that it would be necessary, as Descartes said of the union of the soul and body, to conceive a thing as being at once one and two things. But the inner sense is a guarantor for us. And this is the model to which we assimilate all production in nature, and, primarily, all generation. 20. We have tried, in a historical picture of French philosophy in the nineteenth century, in relation to the works of Vulpian, to show how reflex movements must, on the contrary, be reduced, in the final analysis, to free movement, whereas modern physiology tends generally to explain the voluntary movements by reflex movements, which would result in the elimination of free will. To complete the enterprise will be to show that nature as a whole, if it has its reason in the human being, for which it offers a progressive development of sketches, is ultimately explained by what is its own ground, namely thought, and, better still, love. 21. In the essay Of Habit (1837). 22. Our whole body being reduced to assemblages of vessels in which different organic fluids circulate, as Cesalpini perhaps first taught, the fundamental mechanism for the production of our different movements consists perhaps in the dynamic of the nerves that, by dilating or tightening the vessels, changes the

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distances of their walls and by facilitating or frustrating combinations of physical or chemical fluids. 23. Claude Bernard, occupied for a long time merely with the detail of physiological phenomena, believed at first that all these phenomena of life could be explained by physics and chemistry. He recognized next that, in order to explain the organism with its harmonies, something else of a superior order, that he named a guiding idea, was necessary. This was to bring back under another name either the vital principle of the Montpellier school, or, and much rather the soul (the soul acting not as those who exclude it from physiology say, according to caprices, but, on the contrary, according to the innate imaginations comparable either to habits or to fixed ideas. We reduce to such habits what we call natural laws or instincts, and even action reflexes, all states or degrees of the will or thought that abstraction and personification turn into separate entities). And if he had lived longer, he would have doubtless confessed it. Did he not recognize, in a posthumous work on life in vegetables and animals, contrary to the opinions of the first period, that the explanation of all living beings must be drawn from man?   UNPUBLISHED VARIANT: After having denied that life was something real and having reduced the name that we give to it to a completely ‘literary’ appellation, Claude Bernard came to recognize that, on the contrary, in order to explain the concert between phenomena attested to by the harmonic whole constituting organization and life, it was necessary to introduce an invisible principle that he called a guiding idea. This concession leads one to suppose in any living being a similar cause to that which we find in ourselves, and which we know by the name of soul or mind, a consequence that Claude Bernard has not stated. He stuck to the hypothesis of a pure idea, subsisting like the ideas of Plato without a subject whose thought it is, one of these ideas that the imagination creates following a process of abstraction. Why not resolve with Aristotle, with Plotinus, with Stahl, as the author of the present work proposed in the essay Of Habit, whom Bouiller and Léon Tolstoï have since joined, to attribute to the soul the operations that constitute the truth?   In truth, despite the importance accorded by Leibniz to obscure perceptions and volitions in the mind perceiving and willing, the spirit of separation and abstraction could not resolve to attribute to a single principle the operations on which reflection can cast its light together with others that escape it.   Is it not the same soul that thinks, although often in a very different manner, when awake and during sleep? Would a third soul be necessary that thinks during daydreams? Or does daydreaming have nothing in common with thought?   All our life is full of thoughts that are, if not absolutely unconscious, then at least unreflective; a sombre mass from which a relatively very small number of clear and distinct ideas stand out. At any moment an idea descends into the darkness or rises into the light; to a single idea, to a single volition, elements combine from thought or imagination that offer infinitely diverse degrees of distinctness and clarity, from the liveliest day to the deepest night.   Reality is therefore completely different to how it is represented in a psychology



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that contains neither degrees nor nuances and reduces all to the uniformity of dry and sterile abstractions. 24. Schopenhauer has since arrived, and taught, in the name of a general doctrine of pessimism, that the cause of all phenomena in nature is what we call the unconscious, a blind and, although he has not said why, exclusively maleficent principle. 25. These perfectionings are like glimpses of the organizing soul that thus reveals at times, in favourable occasions, its constant tendencies until the point when, in humanity, they burst forth from obscurity into light. Ex fumo dare lucem. But for this progress one condition is necessary, and this is precisely what the cosmology of materialism and positivism pass over in silence, even while making use of it, namely the motor will. (Materialism always borrowing from spiritualism something to make up for its own inadequacy, to the point of denying and destroying itself.)   It is this sequence of efficacious volitions that Descartes records as an inexplicable fact, revealed to man by consciousness, that Malebranche and Leibniz transport to God without the mystery being cleared up in any way, that Hume reduced to a pure illusion, thus opening the door to Kant’s sceptical idealism, and on which, after Maine de Biran, we cannot cast any other light than to show in it the universal law with the implicit contradiction of the inner coexistence of simplicity containing a multitude, unity in substance, variety in modes. 26. Although it is obscure in the embryo, the soul shines and breaks out in the adult; obscure also in the whole of animality, it shines and breaks out in the human species. It has dived, so to speak, into bubbling matter, as a poet has said of Pindar, in order to emerge from it deep-mouthed. 27. It appears that all generation can be compared to the budding plant, a phenomenon in which is visible the principle of life multiplying itself in organisms that are imperfect at first but whose regular development leads to their independence.   At what moment does the dependence and the continuity cease? This seems to be impossible to determine. And do they ever cease in an absolute way? After having repeatedly reported continuity as a universal law, Leibniz said that it was purely ideal, and that in nature all was distinct and detached from everything else. We might wonder whether it is not true, on the contrary, that fundamentally everything fits together in the world and that between the most different and distinct things there always exists with a secret continuity some secret solidarity.   Budding itself appears to be a kind of polarization, in which, as in electrical phenomena, a superior principle is developed in a sort of image reproducing it in an inferior state. In the animal world, certain arthropods offer a remarkable example of it. The first to appear are not the tiny parts, but the head that contains the principle of the nervous system together with the organs of the principal senses, accompanied by two symmetrical members. From the back of the head emerges a ring with similar appendices, then a second, similar and smaller one, then a third, then others in increasingly smaller dimensions, right down to the

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complete exhaustion of the generative force and a final flourishing into a tail. By tending towards a perfection, to a harmonic form embracing the whole system, nature progresses in its development from the most perfect to the least perfect, the most perfect representing, if it is not it itself, the source of everything. 28. Every being tends to divide itself in order better to know and understand itself. It creates thus an image of itself in which it is repeated and reflected. It is the phenomenon whose initial form is consciousness. The Gospel of Saint John shows us the Father dividing himself into his Word and Thought. And the same phenomenon is reproduced in all of nature. It is reproduced in art. Hence the parallelism in Hebrew verse; hence rhyme in modern poets and, in all music, the imitation in which the repeated motif is always the same and always different. Nature imitates itself, Pascal says once again, the fruit imitates the flower, the flower imitates the leaf, the leaf imitates the stem. In all cases, it is the superior that, by a kind of condescendence, is lowered into the inferior.   VARIANT: Mind has the privilege of dividing itself by a kind of polarization in becoming conscious of itself and moving itself. Hence in every being, since every being is to some degree a mind, there is a scission into two terms of which one is the image of the other. This is not a simple repetition, the first of the two terms remaining, as anterior, superior. Such is in Hebrew poetry, as Herder explained it, the fundamental law of parallelism, the second part of each verse being the counterpart of the first. Such is, in music, the law of counterpoint and imitation.   The archetype of this is the movement of the mind, that is, of the complete being. This is what Christian theology expresses for the divinity in its dogma of the Trinity. The divinity one and triple, moving from radical identity to a duality from which a new unity is formed. 29. [The word was God and all things were made by him.] 30. We could say the same of religions and civilizations, of the arts; it is the universal progress where the universal and in sum universally benevolent Providence has revealed and still reveals itself. Spiritus intus alit, totosque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscit. 31. And previously Aristotle has said in the same sense: every animal compared to man is a monster; a monster, that is to say, a miracle, subject of astonishment, scandal in the Greek and Latin expression. Everything is nonsense and scandal until the prophecy and hope is fulfilled, and the understanding and the heart receive full satisfaction by perfect beauty.   Aristotle had already said that accidents occurring in embryonic development were able to make individuals vary in their forms and for that reason give rise to new species. Let us add to these accidents a ceaseless tendency towards the best, which benefits in some way from making successes out of such accidents; transformism is immediately authorized, and this was perhaps Aristotle’s thought. But this is, as is clear, on the condition of understanding transformism as an occasionalism whose principal factor is an animism or spiritualism, without reflection or secret reasoning, but still full of reason and will, and that we can call, with Aristotle, architectonic.



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  Love has created all, and it has created only by giving itself. All of creation, at least in its highest parts, of which the others are like sketches, testifies, by the perpetual and growing aspiration for beauty, to the nature of its principle or of the spirit that has descended into it and circulates therein.   The inferior world is thus an enigma whose word is humanity, and above all the superior and most accomplished part of humanity. 32. Pascal has already remarked that organisms are characterized by everything within them co-operating and being in some way devoted to the whole. And this is what Schelling must have wanted to explain when he said that beautiful things are those whose organization is the most perfect, at least in the external things serving the life of relation; they are those in which everything seems to love. Just as the organs are made for the functions, so too the forms are made for the movements, in which the life of relation consists. 33. VARIANT: There is an essential trait in the forms and movements of living beings that the great masters of art reveal and that, thus illuminated, cast light on the whole method of nature. This character is undulation. The principle is its movement by which everything, in its development, descends by dividing itself into an image of itself, a repeated movement, segmented by intermissions; hence the vibrations, pulses, palpitations that in moving fluids become waves. Waves are particularly present in the bearing of reptiles, and this bearing reappears either in the forms or in the progression of all animals, not excepting the habitants of the air or the waters. Michelangelo has noted this, saying: every form is serpentine, and Leonardo da Vinci: observe the serpentine motion of everything, as if he thought that the proper character of each being is revealed in its manner of serpentine movement or undulation; thus each being would be a particular expression of the general method of nature, an expression itself of the incarnation in multiple forms of the generative soul.   Undulation is the visible translation of the abandonment by which goodness is made known and in which consists the most perfect grace and the one most present to the heart. 34. Let us add that undulation that develops by dividing, the raised wave that falls, as if abandoning itself, is the line of grace par excellence, the maximum of beauty towards which every species tends insofar as its nature involves it; and, if it is a line of grace, it is because it is especially, in the second of the two moments of the wave, the natural expression of the abandonment and abnegation essential to love. Its characteristic is gentleness, therefore a continuity without breaks or brusque deviations, but especially loosening and relaxation – physical parallels to the moral movement of abandonment, of renunciation – translated by the inset curves. Correggio is the painter of grace par excellence, said Raphaël Mengs, a scholar and discerning critic, and no one has made more use of lines and hollow surfaces.   The movements of supreme grace, expression of the soft affections, are evidently those that Leonardo called the divine movements. The one to which this name is most appropriate is the smile, as manifest in the female, the young

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woman, the child. Therefore, this is (we can say) the acme of the visible world, as love is that of the world of affection.   In antiquity, Venus, the goddess of love and marriage, was often called, especially in the East, the queen of the world. Lucretius said that the earth was covered in flowers for her. She calmed the storms, dispelled the clouds. The plains of the sky smiled on her.   Venus’s name derived, according to Varro, from the word venire, to come, in order to recall the idea of this goddess, born from the sea, coming to the shore on a wave, the same in her grace as the wave that carries her. 35. Nature does not tend directly towards beauty, like art, but towards love from which beauty results like grace results from beauty. And even that which aims towards grace does not attain it. The artist himself will arrive at grace only by evoking within himself the affections from which it results. Love and grace will be given to you as a surfeit.   All of nature tends towards polarization for marriage, therefore to love. Whence comes its beauty.   All of nature, Leonardo da Vinci says, aspires to its death. It is true in the same sense when Saint Paul says ‘I desire to be dissolved’; in the sense that just as every creature aspires each day to the sleep that will renew its exhausted forces, it aspires, in sum, to the final sleep, a necessary passage to a new life. Death, Goethe says, is an act of will, just as much as birth. And soon after death, a sort of superior grace often falls on the features with an expression of profound calm, testimony to a final and perfect release. This supreme moment must be succeeded, for all to conclude, by a conjugal union with the divine principle towards which all life, in all of its phases, has tended. 36. [bronze statues, living faces of marble.] 37. Why enthusiasm? It is because the concern of art is to accomplish in its work, if it is to be a work of beauty, a union of contraries, one that is incomprehensible or mysterious, and that only a divine power can execute. 38. [inspired by the divinity.] 39. VARIANT: If he is not in a state of intoxication; they would not open for him. A sacred intoxication quite different to the one caused by the gifts of Bacchus. A friend of Milton wrote to him to ask for some verse while speaking of some inspired by a drunken dinner party, and the poet of Paradise Lost responded: ‘Wine can help to produce verses on subjects of inferior order. As for those who want to sing of gods and their descendants among men, he drinks water from a wooden cup.’ 40. Let us remark here how much the intellectual approaches the moral. For the objects of intuition, the intellect no longer suffices as it does for those of the spirit of geometry, and we attain them only through the entire soul.   Pascal often says the heart instead of intuitive mind. According to him, knowledge of the first principles of geometry belongs to the heart, and even geometry itself owes its own principles to it. A great modern geometer, Chasles, said that this science ultimately rests on certain ‘grounds of harmony’. And this



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perhaps explains why that for many modern mathematicians the foundations of their science are conventions. Is this not to say that it has its first principle in the will? Not, without doubt, in the caprice that is only a modification of it, but in the true will that is reducible to the feeling of beauty and that love inspires.   Pythagoras went, they said, to learn at the school of the musician Orpheus. 41. The radical error of Pestalozzi was to believe, in his ignorance of art, that a figure must be formed by the artist in the way that it is by the geometer, by a succession of abstractions that are its contours.   On the contrary, the artist seeking the spirit of the form, the soul of the thing, goes from the whole to the details.   To learn to draw is to learn to understand first of all the whole in its mass, better still, to grasp the morphological principle revealed by the mass, and then, from degree to degree, always relating it to the whole, all the detail.   UNPUBLISHED VARIANT: Geometry deduces from certain properties of definite figures other properties resulting from them. The geometric outline or linear design is the application, using precise instruments, of these deductions. There is nothing, or almost nothing, similar in the figures of living beings, and above all in the most beautiful, of which the rest are only deviations. To claim to reduce the draughtsmanship in art, which has for its principal object living forms, to the linear outline is, therefore, a similar enterprise to materialism’s attempt to reduce life to mathematical and mechanical properties, and which could lead only to the diminution of art. Pascal rightfully distinguished from geometric mind, intuitive mind, which it is necessary perhaps to name aesthetic mind, and from which derives everything that is of the special and superior domain of life and freedom. The Pestalozzian system for drawing and art is the false confusion between these two approaches. 42. Descartes, in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, had said that method consisted in preparing intuition, the simple vision of the essential. Pascal distinguished two species of mind, one that he calls geometric, which proceeds by deduction or linking ideas, the other that he calls intuitive, to which he attributes the function of grasping the objects as a whole, all at once, and to which he accords a primacy in relation to the other. This was clearly to retrieve Aristotle’s idea that we cannot always proceed by deduction of reasons, and, on the contrary, in the search for principles we have to proceed by way of reconciliation preparatory to intuition. Leibniz himself, so favourable to logic, recognized that method in invention and above all in principles consists in the employment of similarities and combination. 43. The end appears in the whole. This is why Horace said: at first posit the whole. But it appears to us only confusedly. Therefore, Aristotle says, we must progress from the confused to the distinct, and thus draw not smoke from the bright light, but rather clarity from the smoke.   And yet, after having discovered the principle, having shown it to be brilliant from the whole down to the smallest parts, there remains one more step to make in order to attain the summit of art.

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  Distinct ideas, Burke says, are small ideas.   Leonardo wants, in a finished drawing, everything to fade at its limits like smoke, and thus every indication of limit to disappear in the end. One of the ancients has it that the summit of art for the Greeks consisted in the contours promising something beyond what they show. The same thing is expressed in this remark by a critic who is otherwise an enemy of confusion and disorder: ‘A beautiful disorder is often an effect of art.’ And also by these words of Horace on the greatest of the Greek lyric poets: The deep-mouthed Pindar, foaming, pours along, with rhythms without laws.   Thus only, indeed, at the end of a work in which there is an opening onto something like infinity does sublimity begin. In Virgil, it is by her gait, at the moment when she turns (avertens) to move away, that Venus makes herself known to Aeneas. The Chevalier de Méré, in his aesthetic studies, has remarked that supreme grace appears to be attached to vanishing things. Perhaps they seem to us to lose themselves in the infinite. Apelles, the painter par excellence of grace, loves, they say, to paint the dying. A modern poet, Leopardi, has celebrated the union of death and love. 44. Leonardo da Vinci said that to want to paint without theory is to want to navigate without a compass. But what he expects from theory, as from science in general, is for it to preserve one from error by teaching what is possible and what is not. To ask for more from it is, here again, to wander into the cult of idols, and to take sterile conventions for natural laws. Only works without truth or life would result from this. 45. Between the plastic arts and the supreme art of life, there is an intermediary, the art of dance that Greek antiquity calls orchestic.   The plastic arts produce the forms, orchestic art the movements that lead there, and which themselves imitate the movements of souls. Thus Plato says in his Laws that the purpose of education is to teach one to dance well. 46. Seneca remarks that we generally deliberate over particular parts of our lives, but that no one deliberates over the whole of his life. And yet life must furnish a homogeneous whole. 47. By utility, the one whom the oracle of Delphi proclaimed the sage par excellence, Socrates, understood what serves not the body, but the soul in bringing it to its perfection. 48. While teaching that all Morality is reduced to submitting oneself to duty without searching for that in which it consists, so as to remove any objective rule, Kant allows us to glimpse the conservation of freedom as the essence of duty itself. Of that which proposes the cessation of pain as its ideal, Plutarch said it was a theory of slaves and freedmen.   It was also to set as a goal for man his own satisfaction; individuality is but a poor centre, Bacon had said, as we have seen, the true centre being God. Kant believed that he had effected in philosophy the same revolution that Copernicus had effected in cosmology by displacing the centre of the world. We would bring about in philosophy a revolution comparable to the one that Copernicus



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effected in science by placing the centre in humanity no longer, but in divinity. The philosophy of Kant with his critical and negative mind was like the French Revolution, of which he was the partisan enthusiast, the apotheosis of humanity. 49. What becomes of goodness in this system? Kant relied, for the fair reward of the accomplishment of duty, on a future life, on the judgement of a God. 50. [begin, baby boy, to know your mother with a smile.] 51. The fall, such as it is described in the Bible, was to make oneself the centre, was to want to know independently of divine grace. The demon, the Germanic Theology says, had fallen already before man in having claimed to be someone in and of itself. Truth and duty consist in recognizing that one has everything from God alone; and this is the proof that in everything, in nature first of all, then in science and art, nothing occurs without some mysterious, doubtless divine operation, since it remains definitively impenetrable to human intelligence. 52. The moral rules are generally negative prescriptions. For example, the Decalogue. They are related to details. The sole positive precept in the Decalogue and which, indeed, suffices for them all, is that of loving. You will love God with all your soul, and your neighbour as yourself, that is, you will love God without measure and your neighbour to the extent that it is possible to love yourself.   In a general manner the rules are applied to the details and to protect oneself from faults. The source of actions and creations is quite different. 53. For antiquity, the end of morality was society. It cannot be otherwise if the very essence of the complete being is to dilate [se communiquer], or, to put it better, if, by a kind of contradiction that disconcerts reason, it completes itself only by giving itself. In a certain number of animals, just as we see sketches of virtues, we also see sketches of sociability, and even political association. Only in humanity does sociability go as far as to constitute cities, or states. The goal is a common life, where the members of the society help each and together enjoy each other’s goodness and total felicity.   By association two personalities become one. This is the union repeated by all combination in the inferior physical order. It is formed like a new personality, whose maintenance and development becomes the supreme goal of life, a goal that the final existence will realize. Only then will the state portrayed by Descartes and Pascal of a whole in which each part is judged only in what it is relative to the ensemble be a truth. There alone the soul attains universality, the infinite. 54. When examined closely, the virtues are reducible to a unique virtue that is renunciation and sacrifice. So it is to the latter, when it is perfect or total, that the highest degree of beauty, which is sublimity, belongs. Sublime and disinterest go together. The sublime is, not, as Burke and Kant said, what frightens, but what surpasses all measure, the immense, the infinite and, consequently what the idea suggests of the latter. It is the essential characteristic of the divinity. Love, not the passion which usurps this name and which aspires only to conquer and possess, but true love which aspires to give, to give itself without reserve; this is, without limits, what is genuinely immense and sublime. And this also is the foundation and at the same time the summit of all virtue.

336

Félix Ravaisson

  Must we believe that the reign of the mind and of love is limited to the present life? And that after this moment of concert and concord souls will simply vanish? This is an opinion that is taking root. Would the celestial fire then be only a transitory flame? This is always the opinion for which what is really essential, the invisible, would be only an accident, a final modification of phenomena, or, as is said, an epiphenomenon.   In contrast, the soul being life and the source of life, it is not clear why or how it could stop living. This is the solid foundation of Plato’s arguments in his Phaedo, arguments whose conclusion is not, as it is often erroneously translated, a high hope, but rather a certain expectation of immortality. This was the instinctive faith of ancient heroism. This is what will be revived by a future heroism, based still more firmly on the reflective knowledge of divine existence, indefinitely radiant, and of divine love.   The mystery of love is the aspiration to annihilation. The one who loves, Leopardi says, is the one who understands the nobility of death. Every creature, Leonardo da Vinci says, aspires to its death. In reality, every soul, whatever it is, aims towards a better life through death. The earthly life is a succession of metamorphoses. It is so each day, each month, each year. In each year, the living is stripped of one form to adopt a more perfect one, Jam positis novus exuviis nitidusque juventa, but in the same sphere of existence. To a more profound metamorphosis must correspond, according to the universal law that is analogy, a passage to an existence of a superior order and finally a passage from the finite to the infinite, from the relative to the absolute.

Bibliography

1. Translations cited in this volume Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, On Sleeping and Waking, On the Soul, trans. W. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Bacon, Francis, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. VII, ed. Spedding, Ellis and Heath. London: Longmans, 1870. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. H. Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Leibniz, G. W. F., Philosophical Essays, ed. R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, revised by Martin F. Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. Maine de Biran, Pierre, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. Margaret Donaldson Boehm. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970. [This is not, however, a complete translation of Maine de Biran’s Influence de la faculté de penser, the 1802 edition of which Ravaisson cites in his notes to ‘Of Habit’.] Virgil, Georgics, trans. H. R. Fairclough and G. P. Gould. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.

2. Work on Ravaisson in English Bergson, Henri, ‘The life and work of Ravaisson’, in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946, 220–52. Canales, Jimena, ‘Movement before Cinematography: The High Speed Qualities of Sentiment’, Journal of Visual Culture 5/3 (2006): 275–94. Carlisle, Clare, ‘Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life’, Inquiry 53:2 (2010): 123–45.

338 Bibliography

Carlisle, Clare, ‘The Question of Habit in Theology and Philosophy: From Hexis to Plasticity’, Body and Society 19 (2013): 30–57. doi: 10.1177/1357034X12474475. Carlisle, Clare, On Habit (2014). London: Routledge, 2014. Copleston, F. C., A History of Philosophy: 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2003. Curtis, Gregory, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003. Derrida, Jacques, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Dunham, Jeremy, ‘From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2015, available online: http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/09608788.2015.1078775 Gaitán, L. M. and Castresana, J. S., ‘On Habit and the Mind-Body Problem. The View of Felix Ravaisson’, Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:684. (2014). doi: 10.3389/ fnhum.2014.00684. Gunn, J. Alexander, Modern French Philosophy: A Study of the Development since Comte. London: Fisher & Unwin, 1922. Gutting, Gary, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lovejoy, Arthur O., ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: The Conception of “Real Duration”’, Mind XXII 10 (1913): 465–83. O’Connor, Patrick, ‘Letting Habits Die: Derrida, Ravaisson and the Structure of Life’, Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 19/1 (2015): 222–47. Ricœur, Paul, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. Ricœur, Paul, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965. Sinclair, Mark, ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 49/1 (2011): 65–85. Sinclair, Mark, ‘Is Habit the “Fossilised Residue of a Spiritual Activity”? Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42/1 (2011): 33–52. Sinclair, Mark, ‘Embodiment: Conceptions of the Lived Body from Maine to Biran to Bergson’ in The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy, Vol. 4: The 19th Century, ed. A. Stone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 187–203. Sinclair, Mark, ‘Is There a “Dispositional Modality”? Maine de Biran and Ravaisson on Agency and Inclination’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 32/2 (2015): 161–79. Stebbing, L. Susan, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Toscano, Alberto, The Theatre of Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Viola, Tullio, ‘The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson: Art, Drawing, Scholarship and Philosophy’ in Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung, ed. U. Feist and M. Rath. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012, 155–74.

Bibliography 339

3. Selected French literature on Ravaisson Aubenque, Pierre, ‘Ravaisson interprète d’Aristote’, Les Études philosophiques 4 (1984): 435–50. Beaufret, Jean, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1984. Bellantone, Andreas, ‘Ravaisson: Le Champ Abandonné de la Métaphysique’, Cahiers philosophiques 129/2 (2012): 5–21. Cazeneuve, Jean, La philosophie médicale de Ravaisson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. Courtine, J.-F., ‘Les relations de Ravaisson et de Schelling’ in Jean Quillien (ed.), La réception de la philosophie allemande en France au xixe et au xxe siècles. Lille: Presses du Septentrion, 1994, 111–34. Dopp, Joseph, La formation de la pensée d’après des documents inédits. Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Superieur de Philosophie, 1933. Goyard-Fabre, Simone, ‘Ravaisson et les historiens du XIXème siècle’, Les Études Philosophiques, (1984/4): 481–96. Guilbert, Gaëll, Félix Ravaisson: d’une philosophie première à la philosophie de la révélation de Schelling. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Janicaud, Dominique, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Laruelle, François, Phénomène et différance; essai sur l’ontologie de Ravaisson. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. Leduc-Fayette, Denise, ‘La Métaphysique de Ravaisson et le Christ’, in Les Études Philosophiques, (1984/4): 511–27 Léger, Louis, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Ravaisson-Mollien in Comptes rendus des séances de Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles-Lettres 45 (1901): 327–72. Le Lannou, Jean-Michel (ed.), Ravaisson. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1999. Le Lannou, Jean-Michel (ed.), Le vocabulaire de Ravaisson. Paris: Ellipses, 2002. Marin, Claire, ‘L’être et l’habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine’, Alter 12 (2004): 149–72. Mauve, Christiane, ‘Ravaisson lecteur et interprète d’Aristote’, in L’antiquité grecque au XIXe siècle: un exemplum contesté. Paris: Harmattan, 1999. Panis, Daniel, ‘Le mot “être” dans “De L’habitude”’, Les Études Philosophiques, 1993/1, 61–4. Petit, Alain, ‘Le symptôme Speusippe: le spectre de l’émanatisme dans la pensée métaphysique de Ravaisson’, Cahiers Philosophiques 129/2 (2012): 57–65. Vermeren, Patrice, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, Les Études Philosophiques (1993/1): 65–86.

Index

absolute principle of existence 64‒6 abstraction, faculty of 298‒9 Academicians 104 Académie des Beaux Arts 16 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 10 Achilles 210, 231, 233, 236, 295‒6 Aeschylus 222 Aesop 95 aesthetics 12, 162‒3, 309‒10 afterlife, the 229‒33 Agoracrites 219 Alberti, Leon-Baptiste 146‒7 Alcamenes 213, 216‒19 Amorgos 190 Anaxagoras 306 Anaximander 85 Angelico, Fra 241 animal life 35‒6 Antioch 16‒17, 192 Aphrodite 189, 191, 296 Apollo Belvedere 17 Apollonius of Rhodes 220 appetite 99, 109 Arcesilaus 213‒17 architectonic principles 160‒2, 185 architecture 160 Ares Borghese 16‒17, 201‒9, 214 Aristippus 95, 122 Ariston of Chios 107 Aristotle and Aristotelianism 3‒6, 9‒12, 19‒21, 59, 75, 86‒98, 101‒5, 110‒16, 119, 123‒4, 166, 176‒7, 184, 199, 248, 254‒7, 261, 263, 269, 273, 282‒9, 297‒305, 309‒10, 319 art, nature of 145‒9, 168, 171‒4, 266, 304, 310‒14 see also Greek art Astarte 196

Athenaeus 246 Athens 217, 224 Aubenque, Pierre 3‒4 Augustine, St 10, 267, 270‒5, 316, 318 Bacchus 200, 235‒7, 245‒8, 296 Bacon, Francis 60‒4, 71, 75‒9, 257, 295, 311‒12 Bartolommeo, Fra 146, 171, 308 beauty 103‒7, 112, 117, 124, 147‒8, 151, 159‒67, 178‒80, 183‒6, 189, 239, 262, 293, 306‒12, 315, 319 masculine and feminine 189‒90, 205 being, different meanings of the term 284‒5, 298 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 238 Benda, Julien 14 Bergson, Henri 1, 7‒8, 12‒17, 22 Berkeley, George 297 Bernard, Claude 21, 282, 303, 305 Bersot, Ernest 5‒6 Blondel, Maurice 14 Boileau, Nicolas 265 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 295, 297, 316, 319 Boutroux, Emile 14‒15 Brunschvicg, Léon 20 Buffier, Claude 62, 67 Buisson, Ferdinand 12‒13 Cambiaso, Luca 171 Catullus 198 Cellini, Benvenuto 176, 314 Censorinus 97 Ceres 244‒8, 296 Cesalpini 255 chiaroscuro 241 Chinese art 237

342 Index chivalry 292, 317 Christianity 19‒20, 118, 120, 123, 126, 240, 248‒50, 253, 266‒70, 273‒5, 286‒9, 300‒1, 316‒20 Chrysippus 97, 99, 107, 125 Cicero 10, 99‒104, 107, 109, 117, 120, 147, 165, 171, 189, 219, 246, 260, 297, 299, 311 Cleanthes 91, 94, 97, 108, 124‒5 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles Simon 231 common-sense school of philosophy 2, 8 Comte, Auguste 14, 20, 279 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 71‒3, 76, 180 consciousness 41, 45‒9, 52, 75, 79‒80, 300, 303 Correggio, Antonio da 171, 177‒8, 260, 308 courtesans, Roman 198 Cousin, Victor 2‒3, 6‒10, 14, 59‒68, 78, 258 Criton 95 Crysippus 121‒2 curves reduced to straight lines 171‒3 Cynics 95, 102 Cyrenaics 122 Darwin, Charles 305 declination (Epicurus) 88‒90 decorative art 185 Delacroix, Eugène 11 Democritus 88‒91, 106, 297 Desargues, Gérard 265, 288‒9 Descartes, René 20‒1, 76‒7, 161, 174‒5, 243, 249‒50, 253‒73, 276, 282, 285‒91, 297, 301‒4, 309‒18 desire 9 Destiny 112, 117‒18 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 72, 74 Devivaise, Charles 21 Diogenes of Apollonias 85 Diogenes Laertius 95, 117 Dion 120 divine intelligence 115 dogmatism 123 Dopp, Joseph 23 drawing 11‒13, 150‒4, 159‒60, 164‒5, 168‒77, 184‒6, 312‒14

geometric 168‒9, 174 linear, ornamental and imitative 169‒70 Duns Scotus, John 266‒7 Dupuis, Alexandre 170‒3 Duruy, Hector 13‒14 eclecticism 2‒3, 6, 8 economy, theory of (in Stoicism) 121 education 183‒6 effort, concept of 9, 39, 46, 94 elements 113‒14 Eleusinian mysteries 19, 244‒7, 292, 296, 316‒17 Elgin, Lord 17 Empedocles 198, 200 energy 254 English philosophy 71, 76 Epictetus 118, 123, 125, 269 Epicurus and Epicureanism 88‒92, 100‒2, 112, 116, 125, 127, 297, 309, 314‒15 Eros 240, 319 Eruigena, John 10 ether 113‒17, 123 Eucharist 48, 317 experimental method 8, 61 Exposition Universelle (1867) 14 feeling 50 feminine nature 249‒50 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 8, 10, 64‒5, 77 figurative art 12, 150, 153, 159‒60, 183, 240, 314 final causes, theory of 303 fire 93‒5 Fortoul, Hippolyte 13 Francis of Assisi 272 free will 90 French industry 185‒6 French philosophy 1‒3, 6, 8, 14‒15, 22, 71, 76‒7 Furtwängler, Adolf 18 Galileo 303 generosity 291‒2, 297, 317

Index 343 genre subjects 235 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Êtienne 306‒7 ‘geometric mind’ 19‒20, 161, 165, 168, 259‒60 geometry and geometric method 145, 154, 160‒4, 168‒9, 170‒5, 177, 178, 261‒3, 288, 313‒14 German philosophy 3, 8, 63‒7, 77 Giotto 272 God 5, 51, 67‒8, 85‒7, 113‒19, 248, 254, 274‒5, 285‒6, 289, 301, 318‒20 attributes of 262 see also divine intelligence Gouhier, Henri 14 grace 178, 239, 260, 293, 308‒11 Greek art 177‒80, 238‒41, 314 Greek civilization 286 Greek drama 222 Greek mythology 243‒4 Greek philosophy 5, 85, 299 Greek religion 238 grotesque compositions 237 Guillaume, Eugène 13 habit, law of 36, 44‒5, 51 Halévy, Daniel 20, 230‒1 Hamilton, William 8, 59‒67, 74‒6, 161 happiness 119 harmony in works of art 22 hearing, sense of 40 Hegel, G. W. F. 255 Heidegger, Martin 1, 22‒3 Heraclitus 93‒5, 113‒14 Herculaneum 237 Hercules 95, 118, 209‒10, 231, 237, 295 Hesiod 231, 320 Hippocrates 303 Hobbes, Thomas 71, 296 Homer 17, 149, 231, 281‒21, 296 Horace 95, 103, 120, 147, 149, 172, 315 human figure 308; artistic representation of 175, 180, 186 human nature 61 Hume, David 8, 69‒72, 256, 316 hylozoism and hylomorphism 4

idealism 2, 14, 254‒5 see also transcendental idealism illness 48 imitation 165‒7 imitative drawing 169‒70 inclinations 44‒5 individuation 4 induction 64, 67‒8 industrial art 185 inertia 32 instinct 45‒6 intellectual intuition 65 intelligence, human 63‒4, 69 see also divine intelligence ‘intuitive mind’ 19‒20, 161, 259‒64 invention 165, 167 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 69 Janicaud, Dominique 23 Jansenius 273 Jesus Christ 19, 249, 267, 271‒2, 275, 318 Jouffroy, Théodore 6, 61, 63, 78‒9 Judaism 289 Jupiter 95, 115‒16, 119, 200, 218 Kabbala, the 249 Kant, Immanuel 20, 63, 65, 69‒70, 75, 77, 256, 259, 268, 279‒80, 283‒4, 315‒16 kenosis 21 Lachelier, Jules 14 La Fontaine, Jean de 11, 270 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 305 Langoroucki, Count of 200 Leduc-Fayette, Denise 21 Leibniz, Gottfried 6, 75‒7, 80, 160, 162, 172‒9, 254‒69, 273, 276, 280‒4, 287‒8, 291, 297, 301, 303, 309‒11, 314‒15, 319 Léon, Xavier 20‒1 Leonardo da Vinci 11‒13, 145‒51, 162‒4, 167, 171‒83, 198, 238‒41, 260, 263, 265, 305, 308, 313‒14 Leucippus 88, 91 Locke, John 71, 75, 256

344 Index Louis-Philippe, King 2 The Louvre 15‒18, 190, 200‒10, 216, 220‒1, 232, 239‒40 love 9, 238‒40, 315‒17 Lucien 198, 213‒17 Lucretius 88, 90, 200, 309 Lysander 223 Lysippus 202‒3, 206, 219 Maine de Biran, Pierre 1, 6‒10, 73‒80 Malebranche, Nicolas 162, 273, 314 Marcus Aurelius 108, 118, 123‒6, 213 marriage 248 Mars 16‒17, 189, 197‒200, 205‒8, 213, 219‒21 masterpieces, artistic 186 masters, learning from 183 materialism 2, 5, 14, 163, 254‒8 mathematics 145, 147, 161‒5, 175, 253‒4, 257‒61, 265, 289‒90, 297 matter, definition of 86 Melos 223‒4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 22 metaphysics 63‒4, 68‒9, 77, 255‒7, 279‒80, 290‒2 Michelangelo 146, 150‒1, 154, 164, 171, 177‒9, 260, 308, 313‒14 Michelet, Carl-Ludwig 2‒3 Michelet, Jules 10 Miltiades 206 mind‒matter dualism 7 Mollien, Gaspard-Théodore 1 Mollien, Pauline-Gaspard 1 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 180, 269 moral disposition 106 morality 266, 280, 314‒17 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 241 Müller, Otfried 214 music 160, 262, 314 Myron 218 Myrrhine’s monument 232‒4 mysticism 2, 20, 286‒7 Napoleon 3 Napoleon III 15 Nemesius 97

Neoplatonism 126, 256, 286, 289 Newton, Isaac 60 Nicolas de Cusa 289 nihilism 255, 296, 315 Nizan, Paul 14 noein 4 Nominalism 257 Odyssey, The 231 ontology 66 onto-theology 4‒5, 9, 11, 21, 23 Orcagna 241 Orsi, Paolo 200, 203 Ovid 246 painting 159‒60, 164, 176, 241, 265 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 241 Palladio, Andrea 147‒8 Pallas 200, 220 Parthenon Marbles 17 Pascal, Blaise 13, 19‒21, 160‒2, 165, 184, 253, 258‒72, 275‒6, 279, 282, 287‒91, 312, 316, 318 Pasquier, Alain 18 passions 109‒10 Paul, St 247, 249, 267, 270, 275‒6 Pausanias 213‒17 Peisse, Louis 59‒62, 65‒8 pencil-holder exercise 173 Pericles 219, 231, 238 Peripatetic philosophy 92, 104, 106, 109, 116, 287, 303, 315 perspective 159‒60, 181, 313 Perugino, Pietro 146, 308 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 170, 312‒14 Phidias 146, 149, 199, 213‒19 Philo of Alexandria 249 photography 167, 181‒2 Pindar 231, 240 plane images 181 Plato and Platonism 4, 17, 85‒7, 93, 101‒5, 111, 115‒16, 119, 123‒4, 163, 180, 184, 198, 231‒2, 238, 243, 247, 253‒6, 262, 266, 272‒4, 281‒6, 290, 297‒9, 309‒12, 317, 319

Index 345 pleasure, philosophy of 89‒91, 102 Pliny 171, 202, 213‒15, 219 Plotinus 162, 260, 272, 285, 301, 308, 317 Plutarch 107 Pluto 196‒7, 243, 296 poetry 148, 150, 166, 172, 310, 312 Politzer, Georges 14 Polycleitus 199, 214 Polygnotus 239 polyzoism 302 Pompeii 237 Poret, Hector 8 Posidonius 123 positivism 279‒80 potency 284‒5, 292‒3 Poussin, Nicolas 146‒7 Praxiteles 189‒92, 202, 214, 219 precision instruments 168‒70 Prodicus 210 proportion, representation of 146‒50 pseudo-geometic theory 186 Psyche 240, 319 purity and purification 292‒3, 314, 317 Pyrrhonians 266 Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism 4, 85, 93, 101, 111, 123, 238, 253‒6, 281, 283 quadratura 170‒1 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Crysostome 16‒17, 189, 192‒5, 200, 202 Quinet, Edgar 10 Quintilian 171, 179, 218 Raphael 146, 149, 164, 171, 177‒8, 213, 237, 296, 312 Ravaisson, Félix diverse professional and intellectual activities of 19 and drawing 11‒13 and educational reform 13 and Greek art 18‒19, 23 life and career of 1‒7, 10‒15 political stance of 13 and religion 18‒19

and the Venus de Milo 15‒18, 190, 193‒4, 201‒4 Ravaisson’s works ‘The Art of Drawing according to Leonardo da Vinci’ 11, 145‒54 bibliography of work 23 Les classiques de l’art: modeles pour l’enseignement du dessin 13 ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ 8‒10, 59‒81 Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote 3, 10‒11, 15, 18‒19 ‘Essay on Stoicism’ 10‒11, 85‒127 ‘Greek Funerary Monuments’ 229‒41 ‘Of Habit’ 5‒9, 12, 22, 31‒53, 303 ‘Metaphysics and Morals’ 279‒93 ‘Mysteries: Fragment of a Study of the History of Religions’ 243‒50 ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’ 19‒21, 253‒77 ‘Philosophical Testament’ 12, 19‒22, 295‒320 Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIX siècle 14 ‘On the Teaching of Drawing’ 12, 159‒86 realism 257 reason, faculty of 77, 101‒11, 115‒17, 124‒7 reflection 71, 75 Reid, Thomas 59‒62, 67‒8, 71, 78 Reinach, Solomon 18 relaxation 109 religion and religious belief 89, 115 Rembrandt van Rijn 265, 308 representative arts 145 Revue de métaphysique et de morale 20‒1 Ricoeur, Paul 22 Royer-Collard, Pierre Paul 61, 78 Rubens, Peter Paul 308 sages 90, 106, 109‒11, 115‒22 Salvandy, Narcisse-Achille de 7 Scepticism 2, 126 Schelling, F. W. J. 2‒3, 6‒12, 19, 22, 59, 64‒9, 77, 218, 299 Schiller, Friedrich 13 Scholasticism 59, 67, 283‒4

346 Index science and scientific method 61, 100‒2, 163‒6, 171, 174, 183, 263‒4, 290, 309‒10, 313 Scottish philosophy 2, 8, 60‒71, 74‒9, 256 sculpture 159‒60, 170‒3, 180 Séailles, Gabriel 12 Secrétan, Charles 306 Sellars, John 10 Seneca 96‒7, 104‒8, 117‒25 sensation 41‒4, 71‒4, 124 senses, human 39‒42, 149 serpentine movement 308, 314 Sextus Empiricus 100, 116 Shakespeare, William 149 sight, sense of 40‒1, 149‒50, 159 sinuous lines in art 178‒9 Socrates 114, 120, 146, 164, 281‒2, 290, 297‒8, 312 Solon 198, 232 Sophistry 88, 282, 297 Sophocles 231 Speusippus 302 Spinoza, B. 263, 310 spiritualism 1‒2, 14 statuary 190 Stewart, Dugald 59‒63, 67 Stoicism 10, 88, 91‒127, 256, 285‒6, 295, 314‒15 suicide 121‒2 superstition 89 Swammerdam, Jan 305 symmetry 308 Tacitus 292, 296, 298 taste, sense of 42 Terence 245 Tertullian 91, 316 Thales 85‒6, 281, 297 Themistocles 206 theology, types of 115 Theophrastus 111 Theseus 198, 206‒12, 220, 224, 295 thinking about thinking 87, 286, 300 Thucydides 217

time 70 Titian 171 tombs 229‒33, 237 Torricelli, Evangelista 270‒1 touch, sense of 39‒41, 72, 149, 159 tracing 167‒8, 173, 182 tragedy 222 Trajan’s column 221 transcendental idealism 64, 69 Ulysses 122 van Helmont, J.-B. 273 Varro 245 vegetal life 34‒6, 40, 47, 111, 169‒70 Venus, ancient images of 197‒203, 222 Venus de Milo 15‒18, 189‒226 apple held by 196‒9, 224 attribution of 202‒3 base of 192‒4 clothing of 203‒4, 212, 223‒4 expression of 204‒5 identity of her companion 205‒11 physiognomy of 191 pictures of 225‒6 prototype reproduced by 212‒18, 223‒4 reproductions of 215 size in relation to companion 205‒6 Vico, Giambattista 10, 20, 247, 281, 290 Viollet le Duc, Eugène Emmanuel 11 Virgil 171, 191, 196, 218, 233, 247, 311, 319 virtue 108‒10, 119‒27 Vitruvius 308 Voltaire 10 Vulcan 199 will 46‒7, 51‒3, 80, 125, 266, 276, 280 wisdom 106‒11, 119‒25 Xenophon 146, 164, 198, 239, 312 Zeno 94‒102, 106, 113, 120‒1, 124‒5, 315 Zenon 97 Zeus 115