speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic prejudice.  Listen how he expresses himself on the subject:  “Criticism in France has freer methods.—­When we try to give an account of the life, or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider him simply as an object of painting or of science....  We do not judge him, we only wish to represent him to the eyes and to set him intelligibly before the reason.  We are curious inquirers and nothing more.  That Peter or Paul was a knave matters little to us, that was the business of his contemporaries, who suffered from his vices—­At this day we are out of his reach, and hatred has disappeared with the danger—­I experience neither aversion nor disgust; I have left these feelings at the gate of history, and I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of seeing a soul act according to a definite law—."[143] You understand, Gentlemen:  the distinction between good and evil, as that between error and truth; these are old sandals which must be put off before entering into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more.  The sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure.  We have not here the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of a school.  I open again the Revue des Deux Mondes, and there I encounter the theory of which M. Taine has made the application:  “We no longer know anything of morals, but of manners; of principles, but of facts.  We explain everything, and, as has been said, the mind ends by approving of all that it explains.  Modern virtue is summed up in toleration.[144]—­Immense novelty!  That which is, has for us the right to be.[145]—­In the eyes of the modern savant, all is true, all is right in its own place.  The place of each thing constitutes its truth."[146]

I cut short the enumeration of these enormities.  All rule has disappeared, all morality is destroyed; there is no longer any difference between right and fact, between what is and what ought to be.  And what is the real account to give of all this?  It is as follows:  Humanity is the highest point of the universe; above it there is nothing; humanity is God, if we consent to take that sacred name in a new sense.  How then is it to be judged?  In the name of what rule? since there is no rule:  in the name of what law? since there is no law.  All judgment is a personal prejudice, the act of a narrow mind.  We do not judge God, we simply recount His dealings; we accept all His acts, and record them with equal veneration.  All science is only a history, and the first requisite in a historian is to reduce to silence his conscience and his reason, as sorry and deceitful exhibitions of his petty personality, in order to accept all the acts of the humanity-deity, and establish their mutual connection.  The deification of the human mind is the justification of all its acts, and, by a direct consequence, the annihilation of all morality.  Let us look more in detail at the origin and development of these notions.