9 - Of honour

Summary

There is a noteworthy contradiction between, on the one hand, the civil laws which are the jealous guardians of, above all, the citizen's person and goods, and, on the other, the laws of what is called ‘honour’, in which pride of place is given to opinion. Long and ingenious disquisitions have been devoted to the term ‘honour’, without any fixed and stable idea being associated with it. What a sorry state for the human mind to be in, that the most remote and trivial ideas about the revolution of the heavens should be better known than the moral notions which are near to hand and of the greatest importance, forever varying as they are buffeted by the winds of human passions and as they are accepted and disseminated by an easily led ignorance. This apparent paradox vanishes if we consider how objects which are too close to our eyes become blurred. In just this way, the very proximity of our moral ideas makes it easy for the many simple ideas which comprise them to become muddled and for the distinctions necessary to the rigorous investigation of the phenomena of human sensibility to get confused. And the impartial investigator of human affairs will cease to wonder altogether, and may begin to suspect that there may not be any need for such a complex moral apparatus and so many restraints to make men happy and secure.