Principle of the Idea of the Good 325

• Principle on which true theodicea rests. God the last foundation of moral truth, of the good, and of the moral person.—Liberty of God.—The divine justice and charity.—God the sanction of the moral law. Immortality of the soul; argument from merit and demerit; argument from the simplicity of the soul; argument from final causes.—Religious sentiment.—Adoration.—Worship.—Moral beauty of Christianity.

• Lecture XVII.—Résumé of Doctrine 346

• Review of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the relation of each one of them to the modern school that has recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated it.—Experience and empiricism.—Reason and idealism.—Sentiment and mysticism.—Theodicea. Defects of different known systems.—The process that conducts to true theodicea, and the character of certainty and reality that this process gives to it.

• APPENDIX 371

LECTURES

ON

THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE GOOD.

DISCOURSE

PRONOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE,

December 4, 1817.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

It seems natural that a century, in its beginning, should borrow its philosophy from the century that preceded it. But, as free and intelligent beings, we are not born merely to continue our predecessors, but to increase their work, and also to do our own. We cannot accept from them an inheritance except under the condition of improving it. Our first duty is, then, to render to ourselves an account of the philosophy of the eighteenth century; to recognize its character and its principles, the problems which it agitated, and the solutions which it gave of them; to discern, in fine, what it transmits to us of the true and the productive, and what it also leaves of the sterile and the false, in order that, with reflective choice, we may embrace the former and reject the latter.[3] Placed at the entrance of the new times, let us know, first of all, with what views we would occupy ourselves. Moreover,—why should I not say it?—after two years of instruction, in which the professor, in some sort, has been investigating himself, one has a right to demand of him what he is; what are his most general principles on all the essential parts of philosophic science; what flag, in fine, in the midst of parties which contend with each other so violently, he proposes for you, young men, who frequent this auditory, and who are called upon to participate in a destiny still so uncertain and so obscure in the nineteenth century, to follow.

It is not patriotism, it is a profound sentiment of truth and justice, which makes us place the whole philosophy now expanded in the world under the invocation of the name of Descartes. Yes, the whole of modern philosophy is the work of this great man, for it owes to him the spirit that animates it, and the method that constitutes its power.

After the downfall of scholasticism and the mournful disruptures of the sixteenth century, the first object which the bold good sense of Descartes proposed to itself was to make philosophy a human science, like astronomy, physiology, medicine, subject to the same uncertainties and to the same aberrations, but capable also of the same progress.

Descartes encountered the skepticism spread on every side in the train of so many revolutions, ambitious hypotheses, born out of the first use of an ill-regulated liberty, and the old formulas surviving the ruins of scholasticism. In his courageous passion for truth, he resolved to reject, provisorily at least, all the ideas that hitherto he had received without controlling them, firmly decided not to admit any but those which, after a serious examination, might appear to him evident. But he perceived that there was one thing which he could not reject, even provisorily, in his universal doubt,—that thing was the existence itself of his doubt, that is to say, of his thought; for although all the rest might be only an illusion, this fact, that he thought, could not be an illusion. Descartes, therefore, stopped at this fact, of an irresistible evidence, as at the first truth which he could accept without fear. Recognizing at the same time that thought is the necessary instrument of all the investigations which he might propose to himself, as well as the instrument of the human race in the acquisition of its natural knowledges,[4] he devoted himself to a regular study of it, to the analysis of thought as the condition of all legitimate philosophy, and upon this solid foundation he reared a doctrine of a character at once certain and living, capable of resisting skepticism, exempt from hypotheses, and affranchised from the formulas of the schools.

Thus the analysis of thought, and of the mind which is the subject of it, that is to say, psychology, has become the point of departure, the most general principle, the important method of modern philosophy.[5]

Nevertheless, it must indeed be owned, philosophy has not entirely lost, and sometimes still retains, since Descartes and in Descartes himself, its old habits. It rarely belongs to the same man to open and run a career, and usually the inventor succumbs under the weight of his own invention. So Descartes, after having so well placed the point of departure for all philosophical investigation, more than once forgets analysis, and returns, at least in form, to the ancient philosophy.[6] The true method,