Renan as an interpreter of humanity must be understood as a function of the conflicting forces which were remaking civilization after the Revolution. Distinct differentiating influences are enumerated which prepared Renan to face the immemorial problem-the origins and the end of humanity. He found in history not merely movement without result (Vico, Montesquieu, Herder), but a spontaneous tendency and a vital force (Hegel). Renan saw in the study of languages and religions a possible clue to the origin of the human species. Cardinal positions in his theory of language are indicated. From the study of religions he justified certain analogous inferences. There follow canons for using these conclusions as hypotheses for interpreting further civilizing developments, and also for application in concrete programs, guided by the principle-The end is not the happiness of the individual but his work. Comparison follows between Renan and Comte as interpreters of humanity, then between Renan and Gobineau and Cournot. The failure of recognition between Renan and the sociologists is explained.

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I

The social events following 1789, the Revolution, and the Empire, involved simultaneously the disappearance of a political system and of a civilization. Both the peoples of Europe and the 1In commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Ernest Renan's birth, Le Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique devoted a special number to phases of his work (XX Année--No. 4, 15 April, 1923). By arrangement with the author we are able to translate the paper which presents Renan in his closest relations with the sociologists.-EDITORS.

kings were forced to take account of the new conditions which ruled western Europe as the result of the machine age, militarism, and the principle of nationalities. The states were reformed. The émigrés whom the Empire had not rallied, the Royalists whom the invasion of 1815 had not made French, supporting themselves by Catholicism, the middle ages, and feudalism, favored the theorists of a return to a past bygone for three centuries. The masses, however, preserved in the midst of armies, their secret societies and their faubourgs-both revolutionary memories. A third group, the legalists, demanded from the English constitution, from Protestantism, and from the study of legal, political, and judicial institutions, a solution of the internal difficulties. However, such a solution was to remain in mysticism or empiricism outside of the great organic movement to which the "producer" gave rise.

Following Saint-Simon a certain number of spirits began to take account of the fact that the conservative passion, the revolutionary passion, and the critical passion are powerless to produce anything but retrograde measures, coups de force, or constitutions. They realized that the political crisis hid a moral crisis, and that the national crisis hid a European crisis. They saw that it was a question of social reorganization; a question of the whole civilization. Civilization depends upon the state of the social organization, that is to say, upon the development of the human spirit and the development of the action of man on nature. The advance of society and civilization depends upon the permanent constitution of human nature. The way to enter into the question of social reorganization, then, is by making an appeal to the only European force possessing intellectual authority, the scholars. One must demand the solution of this question from a scientific study of human organization, of societies in different stages of civilization. One must establish their laws. Such were the lofty preoccupations of the social writers, the Communists, the Socialists, and of Auguste Comte, who attempted to fuse the popular tradition issuing from the revolution and the scientific tradition of the eighteenth century.

But the middle class bourgeoisie, holders of landed property, did not intend to leave either to theocracy or to industrialism the

direction of ideas and events. In order to manage their own accession to power, they made good use of the memory of the Red Terror and of the White Terror. With the sure instinct of adaptable men, they denounced in Saint-Simon and in Bonald the spirit of discipline which subordinates the individual to society. To the principle of authority they opposed English liberty, and in order to legitimatize their attitude they mobilized writers, historians, and philosophers. In his works on Civilisation and l'Histoire du Gouvernement représentatif en Europe, Guizot attempted nothing less than to prove the firm establishing of the legitimate and constitutional monarchy as the only form of government capable of conciliating liberty and power, order and movement, the supreme law of society, and the supreme law of the individual. Augustine Thierry, in his works on French history, did nothing but trace the ascension of the Third Estate from the communes. In his Fragments philosophiques (1826) and in his Nouveaux Fragments (1829), Cousin did nothing more than to translate into philosophical terms his political faith, and to follow up the reform initiated by Royer-Collard. Was not philosophy for him, as for Damiron, the faith of the people reflected and explained? He places the origin of the demagogic party in the sensualism to which he relates the philosophy of Condillac; the origin of the absolutists he finds in theology. Between these two extreme parties he places Eclecticism (not to be confused with Syncretism) which is in all things moderate and tolerant. He makes himself thus an interpreter of the reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century.

Since 1804 a more liberal philosophy has commenced to emancipate history and each day to pave the way toward a picture of the past at once more complete, more naïve, and more impressive. Since the human soul has been granted all its faculties, it has become, or will become, capable of entering into rapport and sympathizing with all the developments of the human soul throughout the course of the centuries, with all the situations of humanity, with all the movements of history-be they philosophical or literary—for all these movements are, and can only be, the rich and varied manifestations of all the elements of human nature.1a

Furthermore, we must note that, properly speaking, there is no system.

"Cousin, Fragments philosophiques (3e éd., 1888), II 9 (texte de 1823).

In all things-in politics, in the arts, in literature-one aspires to completion. One refuses to allow oneself to be dazzled by a single aspect of things, however brilliant it may be. One wishes to regard everything successively in order to achieve for oneself a complete and faithful understanding of the idea in question.2

All that one is able to do is to relate systems to beliefs, reflection to spontaneity, in order to isolate free activity-the Ego. The convictions of nations and peoples which reveal themselves indifferently in their arts, customs, religions, and philosophies are the product of the creative consciousness. As Fichte has put it, and in a slightly different way, Maine de Biran and Hegel, the movement of the creative consciousness can be described as "a veritable hero of the philosophy of will and of the Ego." And to those who see in such a fusion of ideas and expression of a German pantheism, Cousin replies:

In philosophy there is no country but the truth. It is not a question of knowing whether the philosophy which I am teaching is German, English, or French, but whether it is true. Has one ever spoken of a French geometry or a French physics? And is philosophy, by the very nature of its aims, anything less, or does it any less pursue that universality of character in which all the distinctions of nationalities vanish?*

The Revolution of 1830 raised such views as these to the rank of a philosophy of the state.

"Born under the sign of Mercury," in 1823, at Tréguier, Renan did not receive from his own people those popular memories which, for Michelet, had the force of tradition. First the preparation for ordination and then for the "fellowship," had placed him successively in the presence of a religious tradition which was beginning to waver, and of a bourgeoise tradition unable to shape itself. Rationalistic tendencies separated Renan from theology. Furthermore, at the same time, his taste for the concrete drove him away from the critical myopia of Villemain, Sainte-Beuve, and Jules Janin "hollow heads, men so smart that they overlook the obvious"; from traditional philosophy with its rural face and scholastic aspect; and from the psychological philosophy, Scotch