_Utinam!_
March 1, 1869.--Impartiality and objectivity are as rare as justice, of
which they are but two special forms. Self-interest is an inexhaustible
source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see
truly is extraordinarily small. What governs men is the fear of truth,
unless truth is useful to them, which is as much as to say that
self-interest is the principle of the common philosophy or that truth is
made for us but not we for truth. As this fact is humiliating, the
majority of people will neither recognize nor admit it. And thus a
prejudice of self-love protects all the prejudices of the understanding,
which are themselves the result of a stratagem of the _ego_. Humanity
has always slain or persecuted those who have disturbed this selfish
repose of hers. She only improves in spite of herself. The only progress
which she desires is an increase of enjoyments. All advances in justice,
in morality, in holiness, have been imposed upon or forced from her by
some noble violence. Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has
never been the law of societies. It is too often by employing one vice
against another--for example, vanity against cupidity, greed against
idleness--that the great agitators have broken through routine. In a
word, the human world is almost entirely directed by the law of nature,
and the law of the spirit, which is the leaven of its coarse paste, has
but rarely succeeded in raising it into generous expansion.
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