Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/281

 CONDORCET, DESTUTT DE TRACY. 259 of these — happy the people in which good deeds are so customary that scarcely an opportunity is left for heroism. The chief instrument for the moral cultivation of the people is the development of the reason, the conscience, and the benevolent affections. Habituation to deeds of kindness is a source of pure and inexhaustible happiness. Sympa- thy with the good of others must be so cultivated that the sacrifice of personal enjoyment will be a sweeter joy than the pleasure itself. Let the child early learn to enjoy the delight of loving and of being loved. We must, finally, strive toward the gradual diminution of the inequalities of capacity, of property, and between ruler and ruled, for to abolish them is impossible. Of the remaining philosophers of the revolutionary period mention may be made of the physician Cabanis {Relatiofis of the Physical and the Moral in Ma7t, 1799), and Destutt de Tracy {Eletnents of Ideology, 1801 seq.). The former is a materialist in psychology (the nerves are the man, ideas are secretions of the brain), considers consciousness a property of organic matter (the soul is not a being, but a faculty), and makes moral sympathy develop out of the animal instincts of preservation and nourishment. De Tracy, also, derives all psychical activity from organization and sensation. His doctrine of the will, though but briefly sketched, is interesting. The desires have a passive and an active side (corresponding to the twofold action of the nerves, on themselves and on the muscles); on the one hand, they are feelings of pleasure or pain, and on the other, they lead us to action — will is need, and, at the same time, the source of the means for satisfying this need. Both these feelings and the external movements are probably based upon unconscious organic motions. The will is rightly identified with the personality, it is the ego itself, the totality of the physico-psychical life of man attaining to self-consciousness. The inner or organic life consists in the self-preserving functions of the individual, the outer or animal life, in the functions of relation (of sense, of mo- tion, of speech, of reproduction) ; individual interests are rooted in the former, sympathy in the latter. The primal good is freedom, or the power to do what we will; the