again agitated in that state of disorder in which it had already been once seen, at the decline of the ancient beliefs, and before the triumphs of Christianity, when men wandered through all contraries, without power to rest anywhere, given up to every disquietude of spirit, to every misery of heart, fanatical and atheistical, mystical and incredulous, voluptuous and sanguinary.[13] But if the philosophy of the eighteenth century has left us a vacuity for an inheritance, it has also left us an energetic and fecund love of truth. The eighteenth century was the age of criticism and destructions; the nineteenth should be that of intelligent rehabilitations. It belongs to it to find in a profounder analysis of thought the principles of the future, and with so many remains to raise, in fine, an edifice that reason may be able to acknowledge.

A feeble but zealous workman, I come to bring my stone; I come to do my work; I come to extract from the midst of the ruins what has not perished, what cannot perish. This course is at once a return to the past, an effort towards the future. I propose neither to attack nor to defend any of the three great schools that divide the eighteenth century. I will not attempt to perpetuate and envenom the warfare which divides them, complacently designating the differences which separate them, without taking an account of the community of method which unites them. I come, on the contrary, a devoted soldier of philosophy, a common friend of all the schools which it has produced, to offer to all the words of peace.

The unity of modern philosophy, as we have said, resides in its method, that is to say, in the analysis of thought—a method superior to its own results, for it contains in itself the means of repairing the errors that escape it, of indefinitely adding new riches to riches already acquired. The physical sciences themselves have no other unity. The great physicians who have appeared within two centuries, although united amongst themselves by the same point of departure and by the same end, generally accepted, have nevertheless proceeded with independence and in ways often opposite. Time has re-collected in their different theories the part of truth that produced them and sustained them; it has neglected their errors from which they were unable to extricate themselves, and uniting all the discoveries worthy of the name, it has little by little formed of them a vast and harmonious whole. Modern philosophy has also been enriched during the two centuries with a multitude of exact observations, of solid and profound theories, for which it is indebted to the common method. What has hindered her from progressing at an equal pace with the physical sciences whose sister she is? She has been hindered by not understanding better her own interests, by not tolerating diversities that are inevitable, that are even useful, and by not profiting by the truths which all the particular doctrines contain, in order to deduce from them a general doctrine, which is successively and perpetually purified and aggrandized.

Not, indeed, that I would recommend that blind syncretism which destroyed the school of Alexandria, which attempted to bring contrary systems together by force; what I recommend is an enlightened eclecticism, which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true, and neglects what in them is false. Since the spirit of party has hitherto succeeded so ill with us, let us try the spirit of conciliation. Human thought is immense. Each school has looked at it only from its own point of view. This point of view is not false, but it is incomplete, and moreover, it is exclusive. It expresses but one side of truth, and rejects all the others. The question is not to decry and recommence the work of our predecessors, but to perfect it in reuniting, and in fortifying by that reunion, all the truths scattered in the different systems which the eighteenth century has transmitted to us.

Such is the principle to which we have been conducted by two years of study upon modern philosophy, from Descartes to our times. This principle, badly disengaged at first, we applied for the first time within the narrowest limits, and only to theories relative to the question of personal existence.[14] We then extended it to a greater number of questions and theories; we touched the principal points of the intellectual and moral order,[15] and at the same time that we were continuing the investigations of our illustrious predecessor, M. Royer-Collard, upon the schools of France, England, and Scotland, we commenced the study new among us, the difficult but interesting and fecund study, of the philosophy of Kœnigsberg. We can at the present time, therefore, embrace all the schools of the eighteenth century, and all the problems which they agitated.

Philosophy, in all times, turns upon the fundamental ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The idea of the true, philosophically developed, is psychology, logic, metaphysic; the idea of the good is private and public morals; the idea of the beautiful is that science which, in Germany, is called æsthetics, the details of which pertain to the criticism of literature, the criticism of arts, but whose general principles have always occupied a more or less considerable place in the researches, and even in the teaching of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Hutcheson and Kant.

Upon these essential points which constitute the entire domain of philosophy, we will successively interrogate the principal schools of the eighteenth century.

When we examine them all with attention, we can easily reduce them to two,—one of which, in the analysis of thought, the common subject of all their works, gives to sensation an excessive part; the other of which, in this same analysis, going to the opposite extreme, deduces consciousness almost wholly from a faculty different from that of sensation—reason. The first of these schools is the empirical school, of which the father, or rather the wisest representative, is Locke, and Condillac the extreme representative; the second is the spiritualistic or rationalistic school, as it is called, which reckons among its illustrious interpreters Reid, who is the most irreproachable, and Kant, who is the most systematic. Surely there is truth in these two schools, and truth is a good which must be taken wherever one finds it. We willingly admit, with the empirical school, that the senses have not been given us in vain; that this admirable organization which elevates us above all other animate beings, is a rich and varied instrument, which it would be folly to neglect. We are convinced that the spectacle of the world is a permanent source of sound and sublime instruction. Upon this point neither Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor Locke, has in us an adversary, but a disciple. We acknowledge, or rather we proclaim, that in the analysis of human knowledge, it is necessary to assign to the senses an important part. But when the empirical school pretends that all that passes beyond the reach of the senses is a chimera, then we abandon it, and go over to the opposite school. We profess to believe, for example, that, without an agreeable impression, never should we have