essed him--for
example a certain new birth of the spirit of association under the Third
Republic--leaving to political authorities the care "of adjusting means"
to the diversity and mobility of things, we may believe that M. Taine
would have confined himself to indicating in what sense we could, with
prudence, lay our course. To do this, it sufficed for him to sum up his
diagnosis and lay down the conditions of duration and progress. In a
matter of such vital import nobody can speak for him. Accordingly, if
the conclusion is not written, whoever knows how to read his thought may
divine it. The work, such as it is, is finished; it already contains his
ideas in full; the intelligent eye has only to follow them and to note
their consequences and combination.

Andre Chevrillon

Menthon, St-Bernard, October, 1893.

BOOK FIFTH. THE CHURCH.

CHAPTER I. MORAL INSTITUTIONS

I. Napoleon's Objectives.

Centralization and moral institutions--Object of the State
in absorbing Churches.--Their influence on civil society.

After the centralizing and invading State has taken hold of local
societies there is nothing left for it but to cast its net over moral
societies[5107], and this second haul is more important than the first
one; for, if local societies are based on the proximity of physical
bodies and habitations, the latter are formed out of the accord which
exists between minds and souls; in possessing these, the hold is no
longer on the outside but on the inside of man, his thought, his will;
the incentive within is laid hold of, and this directly; then only can
he be fully mastered, and disposed of at discretion. To this end, the
main purpose of the conquering State is the possession of the Churches;
alongside as well as outside of itself, these are the great powers of
the nation; not only does their domain differ from its own but, again it
is vaster and lies deeper. Beyond the temporal patrimony and the small
fragment of human history which the eyes of the flesh perceive, they
embrace and present to mental vision the whole world and its first
cause, the total ordinance of things, the infinite perspective of a past
eternity and that of an eternity to come. Underneath the corporeal and
intermittent actions which civil power prescribes and regulates, they
govern the imagination, the conscience and the affections, the whole
inward being, that mute, persistent effort of which our visible acts are