are right.”  Nature is not the supreme perfection, and therefore we will not worship it.  How admirable soever be the visible universe, we have the faculty of conceiving more and better.  We understand that the atmosphere might be purified, so that the tempest should not engulf the ships, nor the thunderbolt produce the conflagration.  We dream of mountain-heights more majestic than the loftiest summits of our Alps, of waters more transparent than the pure crystal of our lakes, of valleys fresher and more peaceful than the loveliest which hide among our hills.  The spectacle of nature awakens in us the powers of thought, and the sentiment of beauty draws us on to the pursuit of an ideal which surpasses all realities.  Nature is not perfect:  let us be forward to acknowledge it, and let us draw from the fact its legitimate consequence.  The stream cannot rise higher than its source.  If man conceives an ideal superior to nature, he is not himself the mere product of nature.  By what strange contradiction is it affirmed at once that our spirit overpasses the bounds of all the realities which encompass it, and that it has not a source more elevated than those realities?  Listen to a thought of that weighty writer Montesquieu:[129] “Those who have said that a blind fatality has produced all the effects which we see in the world, have said a great absurdity; for what greater absurdity than a blind fatality which should have produced intelligent beings?” Without restricting ourselves to this simple and solid argument, let us see how they will explain man by nature.  For this end, we must examine the theory of the perfected monkey, which, introduced to us by the lectures of Professor Vogt and the spirited rejoinders of M. de Rougemont, made a great noise as it descended a short time ago from the mountains of Neuchatel.[130] A celebrated orator said one day to an assembly of Frenchmen:  “I am long, Gentlemen; but it is your own fault:  it is your glory that I am recounting.”  Have not I the right to say to you:  “I am long, Gentlemen, but it is worth while to be so; it is our own dignity which is in question.”

Man is a perfected monkey!  I have three preliminary observations to make before I proceed to the direct examination of this theory.

In the first place, this definition transgresses the first and most essential rules of logic.  We must always define what is unknown by what is known.  This is an elementary principle.  What a man is, I know.  To think, to will, to enjoy, to hope, to fear, are functions of the mental life.  These words answer to clear ideas, because those ideas result directly from our personal consciousness.  But what is the soul of a monkey?  The nature of animals is a mystery, one which is perhaps incapable of solution, and which, in all cases is wrapped in profound darkness, because the animal appears to us an intermediate link between the mechanism of nature and the functions of the spiritual life, which are the only two conceptions we have that are really clear and distinct.  In taking the monkey therefore as our point of departure for the definition of man, we are defining what is clear by what is obscure.