published in 1833, the book of M. Jules Simon upon "Le Devoir," these are all solid and brilliant works, by which the spiritualistic school has victoriously established the truth to which I have referred. And in establishing it, it has paid a remarkable act of homage to another fact, and rendered an immense service by enforcing a truth, with which are intimately connected man's rights in this world, as well as his prospects beyond this world: I mean the fact of man's liberty. This is no question of pure theory and scientific curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution has for man, in time present and time future, the most important practical consequences. Upon what grounds would the claim of man to liberty in the social state rest, what would become of his hopes and fears of a future eternity, if man were not a being morally free and responsible for the decisions which determine his acts? {231} The civil liberty of man during his life on earth, and his future destiny after his life on earth, closely depend upon the fact of his free volition and upon the responsibility which accompanies it. Without free volition man falls in this world, without rights, under the yoke of whatever force may take possession of him, or use him as its instrument; what remains for man, then, but to tremble at the destiny which awaits him beyond this world by virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign Master? To the spiritualistic school belongs the honor of having firmly established and rendered plain the psychological fact of the freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has it allowed itself to be troubled and blinded by the ontological questions which that fact suggests, or by the difficulty attending the solution of these questions. Consequently, it has accepted upon this point the limits of man's science, and at the same time maintained the rights of man's nature. It has laid in man's liberty and man's responsibility the legitimate foundation of political liberty, as well as that of the personal morality of man and of man's future. {232} Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century is at once scientific, moral, liberal. Eminent merits, rare combination in any time, and still more so in our time! With these great merits, and in spite of them, two omissions are still remarkably striking. The spiritualistic school, our contemporary, has halted abruptly before the sovereign problems which weigh upon the human soul, and which, in the first series of these "Meditations," I styled natural problems; [Footnote 38] it has in no respect furthered their solution according to reason, or accepted their solution according to Christianity; its "Theodicy" has remained far in arrear of its Psychology. [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian Religion.]