This cause I call liberty; and I have
proved, in the fourth chapter, that liberty, like reason which
serves man as a torch, is as much greater and more perfect as it
harmonizes more completely with the order of nature, which is
fatality.
Therefore to oppose fatality to the testimony of the conscience
which feels itself free, and vice versa, is to prove that one
misconstrues ideas and has not the slightest appreciation of the
question. The progress of humanity may be defined as the
education of reason and human liberty by fatality: it is absurd
to regard these three terms as exclusive of each other and
irreconcilable, when in reality they sustain each other, fatality
serving as the base, reason coming after, and liberty crowning
the edifice. It is to know and penetrate fatality that human
reason tends; it is to conform to it that liberty aspires; and
the criticism in which we are now engaged of the spontaneous
development and instinctive beliefs of the human race is at
bottom only a study of fatality. Let us explain this.
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