I know that our modern ideas have been offended more than once in this legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst of other social wants.  There are virtues which, in some respects, are more conformable to our taste.  The virtuous and gentle Marcus Aurelius, the humble and gentle Spinoza, not having believed in miracles, have been free from some errors that Jesus shared.  Spinoza, in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek.  By our extreme delicacy in the use of means of conviction, by our absolute sincerity and our disinterested love of the pure idea, we have founded—­all we who have devoted our lives to science—­a new ideal of morality.  But the judgment of general history ought not to be restricted to considerations of personal merit.  Marcus Aurelius and his noble teachers have had no permanent influence on the world.  Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son, and a decaying nation.  Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration for humanity.  Philosophy does not suffice for the multitude.  They must have sanctity.  An Apollonius of Tyana, with his miraculous legend, is necessarily more successful than a Socrates with his cold reason.  “Socrates,” it was said, “leaves men on the earth, Apollonius transports them to heaven; Socrates is but a sage, Apollonius is a god."[1] Religion, so far, has not existed without a share of asceticism, of piety, and of the marvellous.  When it was wished, after the Antonines, to make a religion of philosophy, it was requisite to transform the philosophers into saints, to write the “Edifying Life” of Pythagoras or Plotinus, to attribute to them a legend, virtues of abstinence, contemplation, and supernatural powers, without which neither credence nor authority were found in that age.

[Footnote 1:  Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, i. 2, vii. 11, viii. 7; Unapius, Lives of the Sophists, pages 454, 500 (edition Didot).]

Preserve us, then, from mutilating history in order to satisfy our petty susceptibilities!  Which of us, pigmies as we are, could do what the extravagant Francis d’Assisi, or the hysterical saint Theresa, has done?  Let medicine have names to express these grand errors of human nature; let it maintain that genius is a disease of the brain; let it see, in a certain delicacy of morality, the commencement of consumption; let it class enthusiasm and love as nervous accidents—­it matters little.  The terms healthy and diseased are entirely relative.  Who would not prefer to be diseased like Pascal, rather than healthy like the common herd?  The narrow ideas which are spread in our times respecting madness, mislead our historical judgments in the most serious manner, in questions of this kind.  A state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will, exposes him to being confined as a lunatic.  Formerly this was called prophecy and inspiration.  The most beautiful things in the world are done in a state of fever; every great creation involves a breach of equilibrium, a violent state of the being which draws it forth.