in external affairs, will have no reaction on the internal man, on humanity? All that is predicated of the authority of examples, habits, and good models, is based upon nothing, unless it be upon the conviction that an external, advantageous, reasonable, and well-regulated order of things leads sooner or later, more or less completely, to an internal order of the same nature and the same merit; that a better arranged and juster world renders man himself more just; that the inward is reformed by the outward, as the outward by the inward; that the two elements of civilisation are closely linked together; that ages and various impediments may be cast between them; that it is possible they may have to undergo a thousand transformations in order to be rejoined, but that earlier or later they will be rejoined; that such is the law of their nature, the leading fact of history, the instinctive faith of the human species. Thus far, I think, without exhausting the subject, I have laid bare in a complete, though cursory manner, the fact of civilisation: I think I have described it, and assigned its limits, and I have weighed the principal and fundamental questions to which it gives rise. I might here stop, but I cannot avoid mentioning a question which meets me at this stage of the inquiry; one of those questions which are not strictly historical, and which I will call not hypothetical, but conjectural; questions which we can grasp at only one of the ends, without the possibility of ever reaching the other, nor can we make their circuit, nor behold more than one of their sides; and yet they are certainly not the less real, nor less imperatively call for our deep reflection, since they, in spite of ourselves, and at all moments, are forced upon our observation. Of those two developments of which we have just spoken, and which constitute the fact of civilisation, that of society on the one hand, and that of humanity on the other, which is the end, and which is the means? Is it to expedite the perfectibility of his social condition, for the amelioration of his earthly existence, that man developes his faculties, sentiments, ideas, his whole being?--or rather is not the improvement of the social condition, the progress of society, society itself, the theatre, occasion, and stimulant of the individual development? In a word, is society made to serve the individual, or the individual to serve society? On the answer to this question inevitably depends the decision whether the destiny of man is purely social, whether society drains and absorbs the whole man, or he bears within him something foreign and superior to his existence on earth. {35}