every
research, with the utmost confidence, without either reserve or
precaution, the mathematical method: to derive, limit and isolate a few
of the simplest generalized notions and then, setting experience aside,
comparing them, combining them, and, from the artificial compound thus
obtained, by pure reasoning, deduce all the consequences they involve.
It is so deeply implanted as to be equally encountered in both
centuries, as well with Descartes, Malebranche[3238] and the partisans
of innate ideas as with the partisans of sensation, of physical needs
and of primary instinct, Condillac, Rousseau, Helvetius, and later,
Condorcet, Volney, Sieyes, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy. In vain do
the latter assert that they are the followers of Bacon and reject (the
theory of) innate ideas; with another starting point than the Cartesians
they pursue the same path, and, as with the Cartesians, after borrowing
a little, they leave experience behind them. In this vast moral and
social world, they only remove the superficial bark from the human tree
with its innumerable roots and branches; they are unable to penetrate
to or grasp at anything beyond it; their hands cannot contain more. They
have no suspicion of anything outside of it; the classic spirit, with
limited comprehension, is not far-reaching. To them the bark is the
entire tree, and, the operation once completed, they retire, bearing
along with them the dry, dead epidermis, never returning to the trunk
itself. Through intellectual incapacity and literary pride they omit the
characteristic detail, the animating fact, the specific circumstance,
the significant, convincing and complete example. Scarcely one of
these is found in the "Logique" and in the "Traite des Sensations" by
Condillac, in the "Ideologie" by Destutt de Tracy, or in the "Rapports
du Physique et du Morale" by Cabanis.[3239] Never, with them, are we on
the solid and visible ground of personal observation and narration, but
always in the air, in the empty space of pure generalities. Condillac
declares that the arithmetical method is adapted to psychology and that
the elements of our ideas can be defined by a process analogous "to the
rule of three." Sieyes holds history in profound contempt, and believes
that he had "perfected the science of politics"[3240] at one stroke,
through an effort of the brain, in the style of Descartes, who thus
discovers analytic geometry. Destutt de Tracy, in undertaking to
comment on