I should perhaps make an apology for so long a lecture; but it was necessary to combat seriously a doctrine of morality radically incompatible with that which I would make penetrate your minds and your souls. It was especially necessary for me to strip the ethics of interest of that false appearance of liberty which they usurp in vain. I maintain, on the contrary, that they are the ethics of slaves, and send them back to the time when they ruled. Now, the principle of interest being destroyed, I propose to examine other principles also, less false without doubt, but still defective, exclusive, and incomplete, upon which celebrated systems have pretended to found ethics. I will successively combat these principles taken in themselves, and will then bring them together, reduced to their just value, in a theory large enough to contain all the true elements of morality, in order to express faithfully common sense and entire human consciousness. FOOTNOTES: [190] On the ethics of interest, to this lecture may be joined those of vol. iii. of the 1st Series, on the doctrine of Helvetius and St. Lambert. [191] The word _bonheur_, which has no exact English equivalent, which M. Cousin uses in his ethical discussions in the precise sense of the definition given above, we have sometimes translated happiness, sometimes good fortune, sometimes prosperity, sometimes fortune. When one has in mind the thing, he will not be troubled by the more or less exact word that indicates it:--all language, at best, is only symbolic; it bears the same relation to thought as the forms of nature do to the laws that produce and govern them. The true reader never mistakes the symbol for the thing symbolized, the shadow for the reality. [192] On the danger of seeking unity before all, see in the 3d Series, _Fragments Philosophiques_, vol. iv., our _Examination of the Lectures of M. Laromeguiere_. [193] On the difference between desire, intelligence, and will, see the _Examination_, already cited, _of the Lectures of M. Laromeguiere_.