“Here you are, it seems to me, in contradiction with your system.  Everything is right; the vivacity of my speech therefore is good.  All that is has the right to be; my indignation is therefore a legitimate fact, and it appears to me that yours cannot be so unless you allow (an admission which would be contrary to your system) that mine is not so.”  If you have to do with a sensible man, he will begin to laugh.  If you have met with a blockhead, he will be more angry than ever.  This contradiction comes out in every page, and in a more serious manner, in the writings of our optimists.  One cannot read them with attention, without meeting incessantly with the protest of their moral nature against the despotism of a false mode of reasoning.  The man is at every moment making himself heard, the man who has a heart, a conscience, a reason, and who contradicts the philosopher without being aware of it.  Contradictions these, honorable to the writer, but dangerous for the reader, because they serve to invest with brilliant colors doctrines which in themselves are hideous.

No, Gentlemen, it is impossible to succeed in adoring humanity, preserving the while the least consistency of reasoning.  In vain men wish to accept everything, to tolerate everything; in vain they wish to impose silence on the inner voice:  that voice rebels against the outrage, and its revolt declares itself in the most manifest contradictions.  The Humanity-God is divided, and the affirmation—­ “Everything is right”—­will continue false as long as there shall be upon the earth a single conscience unsilenced, as long as there shall be in a single heart

. . . . . that mighty hate
Which in pure souls vice ever must create;[153]

that hatred which is nothing else than the indirect manifestation of the sacred love of goodness.

The doctrine that all is equally good, equally divine, in the development of humanity, explains nothing, because humanity, torn by a profound struggle, condemns its own acts, and protests against its degradations.  It cries aloud to itself that there are principles above facts, a moral law superior to the acts of the will; and all the petty clamors of a deceitful and deceived philosophy cannot stifle that clear voice.  Not only do these doctrines explain nothing, they do not even succeed in expressing themselves; language fails them.  “Everything is right and good.”  What will these words mean, from the time there is no longer any rule of right?  How is it possible to approve, when we have no power to blame?  The idea of good implies the idea of evil; the opposition of good and evil supposes a standard applied to things, a law superior to fact.  He who approves of everything may just as well despise everything.  But contempt itself has no longer any meaning, if esteem is a word void of signification.  We must say simply that all is as it is, and abandon those terms of speech which conscience has stamped with its own superscription.