ANTOINE LOUIS CLAUDE DESTUTT DE, Count of Tracy, Peer of France, a member of the Constituent Assembly, of the Conservative Senate of the first Empire, of the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute, and of the French Academy, was the eldest son of Claude Charles Louis Destutt de Tracy, Marquis of Tracy, by his marriage with Marie Emilie de Verzure, and was born on the 20th July 1754.
Descended from a long line of distinguished soldiers (the founder of which in France, Walter Stutt, had come over with John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, and had helped him to win from Charles VII. the baton of constable of France, as the reward of his services against the English); the young De Tracy followed the family career; became at the age of twenty-two, lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Regiment of cavalry; married Mlle. de Durtorf Civrac; took an active part in the proceedings of the provincial states of the Bourbonnais in 1788–89; was elected by the nobi-
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1 Mercure de France, Juin 1753, part ii., 185. lity of that province a member of the States General, and distinguished himself in the Constituent Assembly by his labours on questions of educational and social reform. With Lafayette, he served on the frontier, as commander-in-chief of the cavalry; and when that general left his army, De Tracy too retired to Auteuil, where he exchanged the life of a legislator and a soldier for that of a student.
At the outset, his attention was chiefly bestowed on the physical sciences, and especially on chemistry. During the Reign of Terror, he was dragged from his retirement, and confined in the Carmelite Prison. Here he read Locke and Condillac; meditated deeply on the processes of his own mind; and, on a memorable day, the 23rd July 1794 (5 Thermidor, year II.), whilst the dismal corridors of the old monastery were echoing with the long roll-call for the guillotine, in which he had reason to expect that at any moment he might hear his own name, he marked the outlines and wrote down the main propositions of that system of "Ideology," which it was to be the grand aim of his unexpectedly prolonged life to embody in detail. Four days afterwards, Robespierre fell, but many months elapsed before De Tracy could return to his home.
At Auteuil, the fascinating widow of Helvetia was long the centre of a brilliant circle, in which the philosophers of the day played no unimportant part. Sieyès, Volney, Garat, Cabanis, De Tracy, met there habitually. The two last named were soon linked in close friendship. Together, they became members of the newly founded National Institute, at whose meetings the dissertations in which De Tracy first gave to the world his views of ideology, alternated with those in which Cabanis worked out, physiologically, the famous theory of Condillac, that all our intellectual operations, whether passive or active, are but transformed sensations.
An eminent historian of recent philosophy in France has characterized and discriminated the respective labours of the three most eminent members of this Auteuil circle, by calling Cabanis, the physiologist; Volney, the moralist; and De Tracy, the metaphysician, of the sensational school. To marshal into rigid order, our "means of knowing," to elicit the laws which govern, and the secret links which connect, the formation, the expression, and the deduction of our ideas, was the task which De Tracy had in the Carmelite Prison marked out for himself, or for his unknown successor. "Ideology is a branch of Zoology;" "to think is to feel;" such are the epigrammatic axioms in which he expresses his characteristic thoughts.
According to De Tracy, our intellectual impressions are of four kinds: (1.) Those resulting from the present action of objects upon the nervous system; (2.) Those resulting from the past action of objects, by means of an influence superinduced upon that system; (3.) Those of things which have mutual relations, and admit of comparison; (4.) Those which arise from our wants, and impel us to satisfy them. When our sensibility receives impressions of the first class, it simply feels; of the second, it recalls feeling, or remembers; of the third, it feels relations, or judges; of the fourth, it feels desire, or wills. These propositions are worked out in clear and vigorous language, and with a clinching logic to which nothing can be denied, if the premises be but granted.
The Projet d'Elémens d'Ideologie was well received, especially in those central schools of the Republic to which the author had expressly addressed himself. Several professors made it a text-book for their lectures. But ideology was soon banished, by authority, from the curriculum of the central schools, to its author's great dissatisfaction. The second part of the Elémens, containing an elaborate and valuable treatise on grammar, appeared in 1803. The third part—a treatise on logic—followed two years later. Ten more years elapsed before the publication of the fourth and of a part of the fifth divisions of the work, which were published together in 1815. The bulk of this latter volume is, in substance, a treatise on social economy, and deserves analysis, did the needful limits of this article admit of it.
Had the author's plan been carried out, the Elémens d'Ideologie would have comprised three main divisions, each consisting severally of three parts. Thus, (1.) The introduction to ideology; (2.) The grammar; and, (3.) The logic, together, formed (I.) a "history of our means of knowing." In like manner, treatises on (4.) Social Economy; (5.) Morals; (6.) Government; formed (II.) "The application of our means of knowing to the study of the will and of its results;" and finally, treatises on (7.) Physics; (8.) Geometry; (9.) Calculation (calcul); formed, collectively, (III.) "The application of our means of knowing, to the study of beings extraneous to ourselves (l'étude des êtres qui ne sont pas nous)." Like so many other vast designs, however, its fate was to be scarcely half completed. "Nothing more of all this is now permitted to me. This fragment is my last writing," are the touching words with which he breaks off. The gradual coming on of blindness, which after a time became total, to be followed by an only partial restoration of sight, would probably not, of itself, have sufficed to daunt the perseverance of so resolute a man. Indeed, he so underwent a very painful operation as to show that the fortitude which had been evinced so signal in the Carmelite Prison was still intact. But the mind had lost its elasticity. Its dearest friendships had been broken by death. The days had come when the strongest is forced to say, "I have no pleasure in them." To this man they brought a special sorrow. The bright era he had hailed as ensuring "a development of reason and an increase of happiness which we vainly seek to estimate by the example of past ages," had but dawned, to vanish quickly behind thick clouds:
"Another race had been, and other palms were won."
How far the chastened spirit ever realised to itself the hollowness of that philosophy which conjoined the highest conceptions of the dignity and sacredness of man's rights and capacities upon earth, with utter insensibility to his power of living a divine life within himself, and of maintaining the faith "that looks through death," we cannot know. It is certain that the long and deep melancholy that settled around the close of a stirring and brilliant career, never obstructed those acts of habitual beneficence which testified how much the man was better than his teaching. Sensationalism is a creed which tends to "disenchant earth and to depopulate heaven." But many a deed of mercy contained the implicit refutation of a doctrine to which the door still lovingly clung. The man to whom belief was humiliation; who neither knew, nor, according to his own theories, could know, whether or not he had an immortal soul; whether or not there is a God; could yet find it in his heart to build a church for the consolation of humble believers, to whom faith is instinctive and doubts unknown.
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1 Damiron, Histoire de la Philosophie en France au XIXe Siècle, i. 109. 2 Elémens d'Ideologie, i. 39-74, seq. 3 Id. iii. 520-521. 4 Id. v. 523. 5 It is stated by the continuators of Quérard (La Litterature Francaise Contemporaine, iii. 251), that Compagnoni's Italian translation, published at Milan in 1819, contains an additional portion of the fifth part, which has not appeared in French. We are not able to verify a statement so opposed to M. de Tracy's express assertion, or to deny it. But no such additional matter appears in the subsequent translation of a selection of De Tracy's writings in the Collectione dei Classici Metafisici (Pavia, 1822-26), now before us.
6 Elémens d'Ideologie, ii. 11. Of the minor works of De Tracy, we have scarcely room to speak. The most noticeable of them is the Commentaire sur l'Esprit des Lois, first published in Philadelphia in 1811. This treatise had been sent to Jefferson, in the original French, in June 1809. At that day, it was not at all suited for the meridian of Paris. Jefferson caused it to be translated, and called it "the most precious gift the present age has received." In 1814, the anonymous American book attracted the attention of Dupont de Nemours, who brought it to De Tracy, as a book well worthy to be naturalized in France. At first, De Tracy evaded any expression of his opinion. When Dupont, shortly afterwards, resumed the subject, and spoke of an intention to translate the work he took the MS. from the drawer, and placed it in his hands. When, at length, the book appeared in French, it passed quickly through several editions, and was thrice translated into Spanish.
The political career of De Tracy closed with the fall of Napoleon, whose deposition from the throne he proposed to the senate, on the 2d April 1814. He had always been one of the small knot of temperate but firm opponents of the prevalent policy, who redeemed the senate from political insignificance. He was now one of the five senators appointed to draw up the project of a "constitutional act." Three others of the five were members of the old circle at Auteuil. Louis XVIII. made De Tracy a peer of France under the new constitution, but he rarely appeared in the chamber. The course of events was little in harmony with his convictions or his hopes. To listen to a few favourite authors; to converse occasionally with the sally lessened group of familiar friends; to keep up the accustomed round of kindly deeds,—were now the only employments which diversified the home-life of an affectionate family. As age crept on, his thoughts dwelt more and more apart. He was wont to spend not a little of his time in gazing from a window on the passing clouds—his eyes still sufficed for that. "I suffer, therefore I am," he would sometimes say. To the last he entertained a fond remembrance of his early pilgrimage to Ferney; and Voltaire was always the author he most preferred to have read to him. The courtier of Marie Antoinette (the rigid idealist had once been known as le beau danseur de la reine), the fellow-soldier of Lafayette, the senator who moved the dethronement of Napoleon, lived to wander, curiously peering about him, amidst the barricades of July, and to hear of, if not to witness, the many stirring incidents of the first six years of the reign of Louis Philippe. He died on the 6th March 1836, at the age of eighty-two. The wish expressed by M. Flourens beside the grave, that his writings, which are very widely scattered, should be collected, as his fittest memorial, has not yet been accomplished.