no beautiful
errors but those which contain a larger portion of truth than the
prosaic verities, which are nothing else than falsehoods put in a
specious way. Beauty therefore is the law of our feelings, as truth is
the law of our thought, and good the law of our will. We will not
inquire now what secret relations shall one day bring together in an
indissoluble unity of light, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and
in a unity of darkness, evil, deformity, and falsehood. Let it suffice
to have pointed out how a threefold aspiration leads man to God, under
the guidance of the conscience, the understanding, and the feelings; and
that a threefold rebellion estranges him from God, by sinking him into
the dark regions of deformity, error, and evil. Humanity has therefore a
law; it has been endowed with liberty, but that a liberty of which the
legitimate end is determined. It advances towards this end, or it
swerves from it. There is a rule above its acts. The thing as it is may
not be the thing as it ought to be; rebellion is not obedience, and
good is not evil.

All these consequences are included in the idea of creation. The
struggle between two opposite principles, a struggle which sums up human
destiny, is a fact of which each one of us can easily assure himself in
his own person. What will happen when man, sensible of the law of his
nature, and conscious of this struggle, proceeds to encounter humanity?
Each one of us carries humanity in his own bosom. But humanity, the
character of man which is common to us, and which makes the spiritual
unity of our species, is found to be altered by the influence of places,
times, and circumstances. Our reason is encumbered by prejudices of
birth and education, and by such as we have ourselves created in our
minds in the exercise of our will. Our sense of beauty is vitiated and
narrowed by local influences and habits. Our conscience is likewise
subjected to influences which impair its free manifestation. Every one
needs to enlarge his horizon. By seeking occasions of intercourse with
our fellows, we shall learn to discriminate true and eternal beauty in
the diversity of its manifestations; we shall distinguish the truth from
the individual prepossessions of our own minds; good and evil,
disengaged from the narrownesses of habit, will appear to us in their
real and enduring nature. Our taste will be formed, our conscience
purified, our mind enlarged; we shall more and more become m