You think you are employed about philosophy when you shut yourself up in your own individual thoughts.  A mistake!  The most powerful genius of modern times failed in this enterprise.  Descartes conceived the project of forgetting all that he had known, and of producing a system of doctrine which should come forth from his brain as Minerva sprang all armed from the brain of Jupiter.  Now-a-days a mere schoolboy, if he has been well taught, ought to be able to prove that Descartes was mistaken, because the current of tradition entered his mind together with the words of the language.  It is not so easy as we may suppose to break the ties by which God has bound us all together in mutual dependence.  Man speaks, he only thinks by means of speech, and speech is a river which takes its rise in the very beginnings of history, and brings down to the existing generation the tribute of all the waters of the past.  No one can isolate himself from the current, and place himself outside the intellectual society of his fellows.  We have more light than we had on this subject, and the attempt of Descartes, which was of old the happy audacity of genius, could in our days be nothing but the foolish presumption of ignorance.

As for the purely passive reception of tradition, this may be conceived when only unimportant legends are in question, or doctrines which occupy the mind only as matters of curiosity; but when life is at stake, and the interests of our whole existence, the mind labors upon the ideas which it receives.  Religion is only living in any soul when all the faculties have come into exercise; and faith, by its own proper nature, seeks to understand.  The distinction between traditional data therefore and pure philosophy is far from being so real or so extensive as it is commonly thought to be.  But for lack of time, I might undertake to prove to you more at length that the labor of individual thought upon the common tradition is the absolute and permanent law of development for the human mind.

We have to steer between two extreme and contrary pretensions.  What shall we say to those theologians who deny all power to man’s reason, and consider the understanding as a receiver which does nothing but receive the liquid which is poured into it? to those theologians who, not content with despising Aristotle and Plato, think themselves obliged to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus?  We will tell them that they depart from the grand Christian tradition, of which they believe themselves par excellence the representatives.  We will add that they outrage their Master by seeming to believe that in order to exalt Him it is necessary to calumniate humanity.  Again, what shall we say to those philosophers, who do not wish for truth except when they have succeeded in educing it by themselves? to those philosophers who draw a little circle about their own personal thought, and say:  If truth discovers itself outside this circle we have no wish to see it; and who boast