This is owing to the philosophers of the age having been mistaken in two ways. Not only is reason not natural to Man nor universal in humanity, but again, in the conduct of Man and of humanity, its influence is small. Except with a few cool and clear intellects, a Fontenelle, a Hume, a Gibbon, with whom it may prevail because it encounters no rivals, it is very far from playing a leading part; it belongs to other forces born within us, and which, by virtue of being the first comers, remain in possession of the field. The place obtained by reason is always restricted; the office it fulfills is generally secondary. Openly or secretly, it is only a convenient subaltern, a domestic advocate constantly suborned, employed by the proprietors to plead in their behalf; if they yield precedence in public it is only through decorum. Vainly do they proclaim it the recognized sovereign; they grant it only a passing authority, and, under its nominal control, they remain the inward masters. These masters of Man consists of physical temperament, bodily needs, animal instinct, hereditary prejudice, imagination, generally the dominant passion, and more particularly personal or family interest, also that of caste or party. We are making a big mistake were we assume men to be naturally good, generous, pleasant, or at any rate gentle, pliable, and ready to sacrifice themselves to social interests or to those of others. There are several, and among them the strongest, who, left to themselves, would only wreak havoc. - In the first place, if there is no certainty of Man being a remote blood cousin of the monkey, it is at least certain that, in his structure, he is an animal closely related to the monkey, provided with canine teeth, carnivorous, formerly cannibal and, therefore, a hunter and bellicose. Hence there is in him a steady substratum of brutality and ferocity, and of violent and destructive instincts, to which must be added, if he is French, gaiety, laughter, and a strange propensity to gambol and act insanely in the havoc he makes; we shall see him at work. - In the second place, at the outset, his condition casts him naked and destitute on an ungrateful soil, on which subsistence is difficult, where, at the risk of death, he is obliged to save and to economize.
Hence a constant preoccupation and the rooted idea of acquiring, accumulating, and possessing, rapacity and avarice, more particularly in the class which, tied to the globe, fasts for sixty generations in order to support other classes, and whose crooked fingers are always outstretched to clutch the soil whose fruits they cause to grow;-we shall see this class at work. - Finally, his more delicate mental organization makes of him from the earliest days an imaginative being in which swarming fancies develop themselves into monstrous chimeras to expand his hopes, fears and desires beyond all bounds. Hence an excess of sensibility, sudden outbursts of emotion, contagious agitation, irresistible currents of passion, epidemics of credulity and suspicion, in short, enthusiasm and panic, especially if he is French, that is to say, excitable and communicative, easily thrown off his balance and prompt to accept foreign impulsion, deprived of the natural ballast which a phlegmatic temperament and concentration of lonely meditations secure to his German and Latin neighbors; and all this we shall see at work. - These constitute some of the brute forces that control human life. In ordinary times we pay no attention to them; being subordinated they do not seem to us formidable. We take it for granted that they are allayed and pacified ; we flatter ourselves that the discipline imposed on them has made them natural, and that by dint of flowing between dikes they are settled down into their accustomed beds. The truth is that, like all brute forces, like a stream or a torrent, they only remain in these under constraint; it is the dike which, through its resistance, produces this moderation.
Another force equal to their force had to be installed against their outbreaks and devastation, graduated according to their scale, all the firmer as they are more menacing, despotic if need be against their despotism, in any event constraining and repressive, at the outset a tribal chief, later an army general, all modes consisting in an elective or hereditary man-at-arms, possessing vigilant eyes and vigorous arms, and who, with blows, excites fear and, through fear, maintains order. In the regulation and limitation of his blows divers instrumentalities are employed, a pre-established constitution, a division of powers, a code of laws, tribunals, and legal formalities.
At the bottom of all these wheels ever appears the principal lever, the efficacious instrument, namely, the policeman armed against the savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled, but always living, in the recesses of his own breast.[16]