The Philosophy of Misery | Page 4

this idea is preeminently social: I mean by this that it is much more
a collective act of faith than an individual conception. Now, how and
under what circumstances is this act of faith produced? This point it is
important to determine.
From the moral and intellectual point of view, society, or the collective
man, is especially distinguished from the individual by spontaneity of
action,--in other words, instinct. While the individual obeys, or
imagines he obeys, only those motives of which he is fully conscious,
and upon which he can at will decline or consent to act; while, in a
word, he thinks himself free, and all the freer when he knows that he is

possessed of keener reasoning faculties and larger information,--society
is governed by impulses which, at first blush, exhibit no deliberation
and design, but which gradually seem to be directed by a superior
power, existing outside of society, and pushing it with irresistible might
toward an unknown goal. The establishment of monarchies and
republics, caste-distinctions, judicial institutions, etc., are so many
manifestations of this social spontaneity, to note the effects of which is
much easier than to point out its principle and show its cause. The
whole effort, even of those who, following Bossuet, Vico, Herder,
Hegel, have applied themselves to the philosophy of history, has been
hitherto to establish the presence of a providential destiny presiding
over all the movements of man. And I observe, in this connection, that
society never fails to evoke its genius previous to action: as if it wished
the powers above to ordain what its own spontaneity has already
resolved on. Lots, oracles, sacrifices, popular acclamation, public
prayers, are the commonest forms of these tardy deliberations of
society.
This mysterious faculty, wholly intuitive, and, so to speak, super-social,
scarcely or not at all perceptible in persons, but which hovers over
humanity like an inspiring genius, is the primordial fact of all
psychology.
Now, unlike other species of animals, which, like him, are governed at
the same time by individual desires and collective impulses, man has
the privilege of perceiving and designating to his own mind the instinct
or fatum which leads him; we shall see later that he has also the power
of foreseeing and even influencing its decrees. And the first act of man,
filled and carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to
adore the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and
which he calls GOD,--that is, Life, Being, Spirit, or, simpler still, Me;
for all these words, in the ancient tongues, are synonyms and
homophones. "I am ME," God said to Abraham, "and I covenant with
THEE.".... And to Moses: "I am the Being. Thou shalt say unto the
children of Israel, `The Being hath sent me unto you.'" These two
words, the Being and Me, have in the original language--the most
religious that men have ever spoken--the same characteristic.[1]
Elsewhere, when Ie-hovah, acting as law-giver through the
instrumentality of Moses, attests his eternity and swears by his own

essence, he uses, as a form of oath, _I_; or else, with redoubled force,
_I_, THE BEING. Thus the God of the Hebrews is the most personal
and wilful of all the gods, and none express better than he the intuition
of humanity.
[1] Ie-hovah, and in composition Iah, the Being; Iao, ioupitur, same
meaning; ha-iah, Heb., he was; ei, Gr., he is, ei-nai, to be; an-i, Heb.,
and in conjugation th-i, me; e-go, io, ich, i, m-i, me, t-ibi, te, and all the
personal pronouns in which the vowels i, e, ei, oi, denote personality in
general, and the consonants, m or n, s or t, serve to indicate the number
of the person. For the rest, let who will dispute over these analogies; I
have no objections: at this depth, the science of the philologist is but
cloud and mystery. The important point to which I wish to call
attention is that the phonetic relation of names seems to correspond to
the metaphysical relation of ideas.

God appeared to man, then, as a me, as a pure and permanent essence,
placing himself before him as a monarch before his servant, and
expressing himself now through the mouth of poets, legislators, and
soothsayers, musa, nomos, numen; now through the popular voice, vox
populi vox Dei. This may serve, among other things, to explain the
existence of true and false oracles; why individuals secluded from birth
do not attain of themselves to the idea of God, while they eagerly grasp
it as soon as it is presented to them by the collective mind; why, finally,
stationary races, like the Chinese, end by losing it.[2] In the first place,
as to oracles, it is clear that all their accuracy depends upon the
universal conscience which inspires