The individual placing himself before humanity is to accept everything:  this is the disposition recommended to us, in the name of the modern mind.  Good and evil are narrow measures which minds behind the age persist, ridiculously enough, in wishing to apply to things.  “We no longer transform the world to our image by bringing it to our standard; on the contrary, we allow ourselves to be modified and fashioned by it."[147] The individual goes therefore to meet humanity without any inner rule:  he gives himself up, he abandons himself to the spectacle of facts.  But the world is large, and history is long.  Even those who spend their whole life in nothing else than in satisfying their curiosity, cannot see and know everything.  To what then shall be directed that vague look, equally attracted to all points for want of any fixed rule?  At what shall it stop?  It will rest on that which shines most brilliantly, like a moth attracted by light.  Now, nothing shines more brightly than success; nothing more solicits the attention.  The glorification of success is the first and most infallible consequence of moral indifference.  In leaving ourselves to be fashioned by the world instead of bringing it to our standard, we shall begin by according our esteem to victory.  This philosophy is come to us from Germany.  It was set forth on one occasion, in France, with great eclat, by the brilliant eloquence of a man who has rendered signal services to philosophy, and whose entire works must not be judged of by the single particular which I am about to mention.  In the year 1829, M. Cousin was developing at the Sorbonne the meaning of these verses of La Fontaine, which introduce the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb: 

La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure: 
Je vais le montrer tout a l’heure.

He had written as the programme of one of his lectures:  Morality of Victory.  Now see how he justified this surprising title:  “I have absolved victory as necessary and useful; I now undertake to absolve it as just in the strictest sense of the word.  Men do not usually see in success anything else than the triumph of strength, and an honorable sympathy draws us to the side of the vanquished; I hope I have shown that since there must always be a vanquished side, and since the vanquished side is always that which ought to be so, to accuse the conqueror is to take part against humanity, and to complain of the progress of civilization.  We must go farther; we must prove that the vanquished deserved to be so, that the conqueror not only serves the interests of civilization, but that he is better, more moral than the vanquished, and that it is on that account he is the conqueror....  It is time that the philosophy of history should place at its feet the declamations of philanthropy."[148]

These words are worth considering.  When Brennus the Gaul was having the gold weighed which he exacted from the vanquished Romans, he threw his heavy sword into the balance, exclaiming, Vae Victis! Woe to the conquered!  He simply meant to say that he was the stronger, and did not foresee that a Gaul of the nineteenth century, availing himself of the labors of learned Germany, would demonstrate that being the stronger he was on that very account the more just.  But we must not wander too far from our subject.