Victor Cousin

Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, comme de l'art pour l'art.—Religion must exist for the sake of religion, morality for the sake of morality, just as art exists for the sake of art.

Victor Cousin (French: [kuzɛ̃]; 28 November 1792 – 14 January 1867) was a French philosopher. He was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. As the administrator of public instruction for over a decade, Cousin also had an important influence on French educational policy.

Quotes

• Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, comme de l'art pour l'art...le beau ne peut être la voie ni de l'utile, ni du bien, ni du saint; il ne conduit qu'à lui-même.
  • Religion must exist for the sake of religion, morality for the sake of morality, just as art exists for the sake of art...Beauty can be the path to neither utility, nor goodness, nor holiness; it leads only to itself.
  • Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien (Sorbonne lecture, 1818); Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l'année 1818 (Paris, 1836) pp. 224–25

• When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East-above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe-we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.
  • Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie (1825–40), as translated by O. W. Wright, Course of the History of Modern Philosophy (New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860) vol. 1, lecture 2

Attributed

• India contains the whole history of philosophy in a nutshell.
  • In Swami Abhedananda, India and Her People (New York: The Vedanta Society, 1906) p. 12