ities are of the first
rank; they are the motive power of civilization, and constitute the
nobleness of the individual; society exists by them alone, and by them
alone man is great. But if they are the finest fruit of the human
plant, they are not its root; they give us our value, but do not
constitute our elements. Neither the vices nor the virtues of man are
his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to know him; approbation
or disapprobation does not define him; the names of good or bad tell
us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche in an Italian court
of the fifteenth century; he would be a great statesman. Transport
this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a shop; he will be an
exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible probity, is in his
drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a family, so
humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its
circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its
circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from
two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential
man is found concealed far below these moral badges; they only point
out the useful or noxious effect of our inner constitution: they do
not reveal our inner constitution. They are safety or advertising
lights attached to our names, to warn the passer-by to avoid or
approach us; they are not the explanatory chart of our being.

Our true essence consists in the causes of our good or bad qualities,
and these causes are discovered in the temperament, the species and
degree of imagination, the amount and velocity of attention, the
magnitude and direction of primitive passions. A character is a force,
like gravity, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of pernicious or
profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise than by the
amount of the weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It is
therefore to ignore man, to reduce him, as Thackeray and English
literature generally do, to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is
to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to
neglect the inner and natural element. We will find the same fault in
English criticism, always moral, never psychological, bent on exactly
measuring the degree of human honesty, ignorant of the mechanism of
our sentiments and faculties; we will find the same fault in English
religion, which is but an emotion or a discipline; in their
philosophy, dest