guarded in your reply. I have read faithfully your favorite journals, your most esteemed authors. I find everywhere only vain and puerile entités; nowhere do I discover an idea.
I will explain the meaning of this word entité,—new, without doubt, to most of you.
By entité is generally understood a substance which the imagination grasps, but which is incognizable by the senses and the reason. Thus the soporific power of opium, of which Sganarelle speaks, and the peccant humors of ancient medicine, are entités. The entité is the support of those who do not wish to confess their ignorance. It is incomprehensible; or, as St. Paul says, the argumentum non apparentium. In philosophy, the entité is often only a repetition of words which add nothing to the thought.
For example, when M. Pierre Leroux—who says so many excellent things, but who is too fond, in my opinion, of his Platonic formulas—assures us that the evils of humanity are due to our ignorance of life, M. Pierre Leroux utters an entité; for it is evident that if we are evil it is because we do not know how to live; but the knowledge of this fact is of no value to us.
When M. Edgar Quinet declares that France suffers and declines because there is an antagonism of men and of interests, he declares an entité; for the problem is to discover the cause of this antagonism.
When M. Lamennais, in thunder tones, preaches self-sacrifice and love, he proclaims two entités; for we need to know on what conditions self-sacrifice and love can spring up and exist.
So also, proletaires, when you talk of liberty, progress, and the sovereignty of the people, you make of these naturally intelligible things so many entités in space: for, on the one
