Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/12

 or more given quantities. So exactly had Laplace thought out every detail of his work.

What Laplace did for the celestial mechanics, the French philosophers of the eighteenth century did also for the study of most phenomena of life, as well as for those of the human understanding and feeling (psychology). They gave up the metaphysics that prevailed in the works of their predecessors and in those of the German philosopher, Kant.

It is known, indeed, that Kant, for instance, explained man's moral feeling by saying that it represents "a categorical imperative," and that a particular principle of behaviour is obligatory "if we conceive it as a law capable of universal application." But every word in this definition represents something nebulous and incomprehensible ("imperative" and "categorical," "law," "universal"!) that has been introduced instead of moral facts, known to us all, and of which he attempted to give the explanation.

The French Encyclopaedists could not be satisfied with such "grand words" by way of "explanations." Like their Scotch and English predecessors, when they wanted to explain whence man obtained his conception of good and evil, they did not insert, as Goethe said, "a little word where the ideas were wanting." They studied man himself; and, like Hutcheson (1725), and later on Adam Smith in his best work, "The Origin of Moral Feeling," they found that the moral sentiment of man derives its origin from a feeling of pity and of sympathy which we feel towards those who suffer; that it springs from our capacity of identifying ourselves with others; so much so that we almost feel physical pain when we see a child beaten in our presence, and our nature revolts at such behaviour.

Beginning with such every-day observations as these and with well-known facts, the Encyclopaedists arrived at broad generalisations. By this method they really explained moral feeling, which is a complex fact, by showing from which simpler facts it originates. But they never put, instead of known and comprehensible facts, incomprehensible and nebulous words, which explained absolutely nothing—such words as "imperative" and "categorical," or "universal law."

The advantage of this method is obvious. Instead of looking for an "inspiration from on high," instead of seeking for a supernatural origin, placed outside of humanity, for the moral sense, they said: "Here is your human feeling of pity and sympathy, inherited by man at his very origin, which man has