pretension of small, exclusive, and fanatical minds; the duty, more imperative now than ever, of whomsoever has for either a serious and enlightened love, is to bring together and unite, instead of dividing and wasting the powers of the mind and the soul, in the interest of the common cause and the great object which the Christian religion and philosophy pursue, each in its own way,--I mean the moral grandeur of humanity.[262] FOOTNOTES: [245] Lectures 4 and 7. [246] Such is the common vice of nearly all theodiceas, without excepting the best--that of Leibnitz, that of Clarke; even the most popular of all, the _Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard_. See our small work entitled _Philosophie Populaire_, 3d edition, p. 82. [247] On the Cartesian argument, see above, part 1st, lecture 4; see also 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, and especially vol. v., lecture 6. [248] _Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne_, p. 24: "The infinite being, inasmuch as infinite, is not a mover, a cause; neither is he, inasmuch as infinite, an intelligence; neither is he a will; neither is he a principle of justice, nor much less a principle of love. We have no right to impute to him all these attributes in virtue of the single argument that every contingent being supposes a being that is not so, that every finite supposes an infinite. The God given by this argument is the God of Spinoza, is rigorously so; but he is almost as though he were not, at least for us who with difficulty perceive him in the inaccessible heights of an eternity and existence that are absolute, void of thought, of liberty, of love, similar to nonentity itself, and a thousand times inferior, in his infinity and eternity, to an hour of our finite and perishable existence, if during this fleeting hour we know what we are, if we think, if we love something else than ourselves, if we feel capable of freely sacrificing to an idea the few minutes that have been accorded to us." [249] This theodicea is here _in resume_, and in the 4th and 5th lectures of part first, as well as in the lecture that follows. The most important of our different writings, on this point, will be found collected and elucidated by each other, in the Appendix to the 5th lecture of the first volume of the 1st Series.--See our translation of this entire Series of M. Cousin's works, under the title of the History of Modern Philosophy.