out; mankind, during
two hundred years, during five hundred years, have represented to
themselves a certain ideal figure of man, in mediaeval times the knight
and the monk, in our classic period the courtier and refined talker;
this creative and universal conception has monopolized the entire
field of action and thought, and, after spreading its involuntary
systematic works over the world, it languished and then died out,
and now a new idea has arisen, destined to a like domination and to
equally multiplied creations. Note here that the latter depends in
part on the former, and that it is the former, which, combining its
effect with those of national genius and surrounding circumstances,
will impose their bent and their direction on new-born things. It is
according to this law that great historic currents are formed, meaning
by this, the long rule of a form of intellect or of a master idea,
like that period of spontaneous creations called the Renaissance, or
that period of oratorical classifications called the Classic Age, or
that series of mystic systems called the Alexandrine and Christian
epoch, or that series of mythological efflorescences found at the
origins of Germany, India, and Greece. Here as elsewhere, we are
dealing merely with a mechanical problem: the total effect is a
compound wholly determined by the grandeur and direction of the forces
which produce it. The sole difference which separates these moral
problems from physical problems lies in this, that in the former the
directions and grandeur cannot be estimated by or stated in figures
with the same precision as in the latter. If a want, a faculty, is
a quantity capable of degrees, the same as pressure or weight, this
quantity is not measurable like that of the pressure or weight. We
cannot fix it in an exact or approximative formula; we can obtain or
give of it only a literary impression; we are reduced to nothing and
citing the prominent facts which make it manifest and which nearly, or
roughly, indicate about what grade on the scale it must be ranged at.
And yet, notwithstanding the methods of notation are not the same
in the moral sciences as in the physical sciences, nevertheless,
as matter is the same in both, and is equally composed of forces,
directions, and magnitudes, we can still show that in one as in the
other, the final effect takes place according to the same law. This is
great or small according as the fundamental forces are great or small