perfect clearness? No, that does not suffice: the evidence may be
deceptive; there can be false evidence; all the wrong ideas of the
philosophers of antiquity, save when they were sophists, had for them the
character of being evident. Why? Why should error be presented to the mind
as an evident truth? Because in truth, in profound truthfulness, it must
be admitted that judgment does not depend upon the intelligence. And on
what does it depend? On will, on free-will. This is how. No doubt, error
depends on our judgment, but our judgment depends on our will in the sense
that it depends on us whether we adhere to our judgment without it being
sufficiently precise or do not adhere to it because it is not sufficiently
precise: "If I abstain from giving my judgment on a subject when I do not
conceive it with sufficient clearness and distinction, it is evident that I
shall not be deceived." Evidence is therefore not only a matter of
judgment, of understanding, of intelligence, it is a matter of energetic
will and of freedom courageously acquired. We are confronted with evidence
when, with a clear brain, we are capable, in order to accept or refuse what
it lays before us, of acting "after such a fashion," of having put
ourselves in such a state of the soul that we feel "that no external force
can constrain us to think in such or such a way."

These external forces are authority, prejudices, personal interest, or that
of party. The faculty of perceiving evidence is therefore the triumph both
of sound judgment in itself and of a freedom of mind which, supposing
probity, scrupulousness, and courage, and perhaps the most difficult of all
courage, supposes a profound and vigorous morality. Evidence is given only
to men who are first highly intelligent and next, or rather before all
else, are profoundly honest. Evidence is not a consequence of morality; but
morality is the _condition_ of evidence.

There is the foundation of the method of Descartes; add to it his advice on