to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue
with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here
the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of a
school. I open again the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and there I encounter
the theory of which M. Taine has made the application: "We no longer
know anything of morals, but of manners; of principles, but of facts. We
explain everything, and, as has been said, the mind ends _by approving
of all that it explains_. Modern virtue is summed up in
toleration.[144]--Immense novelty! That which is, has for us the right
to be.[145]--In the eyes of the modern savant, all is true, all is right
in its own place. The place of each thing constitutes its truth."[146]

I cut short the enumeration of these enormities. All rule has
disappeared, all morality is destroyed; there is no longer any
difference between right and fact, between what is and what ought to be.
And what is the real account to give of all this? It is as follows:
Humanity is the highest point of the universe; above it there is
nothing; humanity is God, if we consent to take that sacred name in a
new sense. How then is it to be judged? In the name of what rule? since
there is no rule: in the name of what law? since there is no law. All
judgment is a personal prejudice, the act of a narrow mind. We do not
judge God, we simply recount His dealings; we accept all His acts, and
record them with equal veneration. All science is only a history, and
the first requisite in a historian is to reduce to silence his
conscience and his reason, as sorry and deceitful exhibitions of his
petty personality, in order to accept all the acts of the
humanity-deity, and establish their mutual connection. The deification
of the human mind is the justification of all its acts, and, by a direct
consequence, the annihilation of all morality. Let us look more in
detail at the origin and development of these notions.