Translator’s note: Jules Lequyer (1814-1862) [also spelled, Lequier] wrote extensively but

published nothing. He circulated his autobiographical meditation, “The Hornbeam Leaf” [La
Feuille Charmille], among friends, considering it one of his most polished works. It was meant to
serve as the introduction to a book. The following translation is based on the French as reprinted
in Jean Grenier’s edition of Lequyer’s Œuvres complètes (Neuchâtel, Suisse: Éditions de la
Baconnière), pp. 13-17. Pages numbers in brackets refer to this edition. This is the second
English translation of “The Hornbeam Leaf.” The first is by Harvey Brimmer and Jacqueline
Delobel and is published as “Jules Lequyer’s ‘the Hornbeam Leaf,” in Philosophy in Context 3
(1974): 94-100. [Donald Wayne Viney]

THE HORNBEAM LEAF 1

[13] In matters of metaphysics, I would dare to put a child above even a good and wise
husbandman who had read nothing. What astonishing questions! What audacity and rectitude,
what simplicity and profundity in his way of posing problems! What eagerness, what patience in
listening to responses one makes to him! And often what naive regret in not understanding them!
Unhappily, in becoming a man, he loses his modesty along with his advantages. It is not
altogether his fault. Language deceives him, examples lead him astray, authority tyrannizes him.
One takes advantage of his virtues to seduce him, and he clings to errors that one teaches him,
with all the affection that he reserves for those who used to promise him the truth. I suffered the
common lot and I would have much to unlearn; but regarding these great questions of free will
and of Providence, the reasoning of the doctors have never had any power over me. They gave
me long and diverse explanations in abundance; I did as a child, I listened and I did not
understand at all. Finally, comparing this profusion of arguments and of insights, in which the
two truths one would harmonize were one after another annihilated, to my proud indigence
which at least conserved them in their integrity, I came to recognize that one of my oldest
memories was also for me one of the most instructive.2

1
Grenier’s note: The Hornbeam Leaf, which constitutes this Introduction, is the only chapter of his work
that Lequier judged finished and which he had copies circulated among his friends. L. Dugas made a literary study
of it (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, mars 1914) with drafts and variations of manuscripts 249, 250, 251,
268. Renouvier republished it separately in Psychologie rationnelle (T. II, pp. 128 sqq.)
2
Grenier’s note: Renouvier reproducing The Hornbeam Leaf (loc. cit.), writes, “This is a narrative, besides
being very veridical, I have no doubt, of a lively impression from the author’s childhood, which was the point of
departure of his philosophical effort.”
 There is an hour of childhood that one never forgets when [14] one concentrates all one’s
attention on a single idea, on a movement of the soul, on an otherwise ordinary circumstance,
and there is opened, by an unexpected glimpse, the rich perspectives of the interior world.
Reflection has interrupted play, and, without help from anyone else, one tries for the first time to
think.
One day, in my father’s garden, at the moment of taking a hornbeam leaf, I suddenly
marveled at feeling myself to be the absolute master of this action, insignificant though it was.
To do or not to do! both so equally within my power! A single cause, me, capable at a single
instant, as though I were double, of two completely opposite effects! and, by one, or by the other,
author of something eternal, for whatever my choice, it would henceforth be eternally true that
something would have taken place at this point of time that it had pleased me to decide. I was not
equal to my astonishment; I drew back, I recovered, my heart beating precipitously.
I was going to put my hand on the branch, and create in good faith, without knowing it, a
mode of being, when I raised my eyes and paused at a slight noise coming from the foliage.
A frightened bird had taken flight. To fly away was to perish. A sparrow hawk passing by
seized it in midair.
I am the one who had handed it over, I said to myself with sadness. The caprice which
made me touch this branch and not another had caused its death. Afterwards, in the language of
my years (the guileless language that my memory cannot recover), I continued: Such then is the
way things are connected. The action that everyone calls unimportant is the one whose
repercussion is perceived by no one, and it is only by reason of ignorance that one succeeds in
being unconcerned.3 Who knows what the first movement I am going to make will decide in my
future existence? It may be that from circumstance to circumstance my entire life will be
different, and that, later by virtue of a secret connection which, by a multitude of intermediaries,
connects the least things to the most considerable events, I will become the rival of men whose
names my father only pronounces with respect, in the evening, near the hearth, while one listens
to him in silence.
Oh, the charm of memories! The earth encircled by the blazes of [15] springtime and the
vagrant fly buzzing along the avenues. Before these half-opened flowers which seemed to
breathe, before this nascent verdure, this grass, this moss filled with an innumerable number of

3
Grenier’s note: Cf. the critique of the feeling of freedom in Part 3 (infra, p. XX).
diverse hosts; at these songs, at these cries which intermittently cut through the dull noise of the
earth in travail, so incessant, so intense, and so soft that one might think one could hear the
circulation of the sap from branch to branch and the springs of life bubbling in the distance, I
don’t know why I imagined that everything, from my thought to the faintest quivering of the
most insignificant of beings, would be remembered in the womb of nature, in a profound center,
heart of the world, consciousness of consciousnesses, forming a powerful and luminous ray from
the gathering of the feeble and obscure feelings isolated in each one of them. And it seemed to
me that this nature, sensible of my anguish, looked for a million ways to warn me. All sounds
were words, all movements were signs. Standing at the foot of an old tree, I looked at it with
uneasiness and with a sort of deference, when, the passing breeze bowed it and it slowly shook
its hoary head. What is this bird of prey whose claws I brave, I said to myself, or what is this
glorious fate that I prepare for myself? Yet, I put out my hand, I took hold of the fatal leaf.
But what if this present determination, rather than initiating a train of events, merely
continues the past train of events by an other, from long ago certain for some being superior to
me, and occurring in its time in this general order that I have not in any way made? If I seem
sovereign in my innermost heart, was this at base, to not feel my dependence? What if each of
my acts of will was an effect before being a cause, so that this choice, this free choice, this
choice that is apparently as free as chance, might have really been (having in it nothing of
chance) the inevitable consequence of an anterior choice, and that choice the consequence of
another, and always the same, to trace backward to times of which I had no memory? This
weighed in my spirit like the dawn full of sadness of the coming day. An idea . . . Ah! what an
idea! What a vision! I am fascinated by it. The man today, in gathering the recollections of this
extraordinary distress which the child experienced, experiences it anew. I can no longer
distinguish the anxieties of the one from the anxieties of the other; the same idea, terrible,
irresistible, inundates my intelligence again with its clarity, occupying at the same time all the
region and all the outlets of [16] my thought. I don’t know how to portray the conflict of these
emotions.4

4
Grenier’s note: This paragraph and the following paragraph are comparable to Part 4 (infra, p. XX), that
Renouvier had titled “Power of the Idea of Necessity,” and with fragments that I published under the same title
(Jules Lequier, Œuvres complètes, Éditions de la Baconnière, p. 356).
 In a point of this vast world animated by a continual movement and continually
transformed, where from instant to instant nothing was produced that did not have the reason for
its existence in the anterior state of things, I saw myself beyond my memories. I saw myself at
my origin, me, this newborn who was me. I saw this foreign me who began my being deposited,
unbeknownst to it, in a point of this universe—mysterious seed destined to become with the
years that which its nature required and that of the complex environment which surrounded it.
Then, in the perspectives of the memory of myself that I extended from the supposed
perspectives of my future, I appeared to myself. I was multiplied in a train of diverse personages,
of which the last, if he turned towards them, one day, at a supreme moment, and asked them why
they have acted this way and why they have halted at such a thought would hear them gradually
nearer and nearer calling endlessly to one another. I understood the fallacy of muttering these
ridiculous words at the moment of acting: Let us ponder, let us see what I am going to do. Were I
to seriously reflect, I would no more succeed in becoming the author of my acts by means of my
reflections than my reflections by means of my reflections; if I was occasionally overrun by the
feeling of my power—for I have yet the feeling of my own power—it is only the feeling of its
passage in me and it submerges me in its waves, the power employed to hold together this
universal ebb and flow. I knew that, not being my own principle, I was the principle of nothing. I
knew that my defect and my weakness were to have been made. I knew that whoever had been
made, had been made stripped of the noble faculty of making. I knew that the sublime, the
miracle as well, alas! the impossible, was to act: no matter where within me and no matter how,
but to act; to give a first push, to will a first act of will, to begin something in some fashion (of
what might I have been capable if I might have been capable of something!), to act, one time,
entirely of my own authority, that is to say to act. And feeling, by the pain of losing the illusion,
the joy that one would have had to possess so beautiful a privilege, I found myself reduced to the
role of spectator, by turns amused and saddened by a changing tableau which took shape [17] in
me without me, and which, sometimes faithful and sometimes lying, showed me, under the
appearances ever equivocal, both myself and the world, to me always credulous, and always
powerless to suspect my present error or to regain the truth. There was only this truth, now so
clear to my eyes, of my invincible powerlessness to ever defeat any error, if by another error, I
tried any useless and inevitable effort. A single idea, a single idea, reverberated everywhere, a
single sun with uniform rays: what I had done was necessary. This that I think is necessary. The
absolute necessity for that which is to be at the instant and in the manner that it is, with this
formidable consequence: good and evil confounded, equal, fruits born of the same sap and the
same stalk. At this idea, which repulsed my entire being I uttered a cry of distress and terror. The
leaf fell from my hands, and as though I had touched the tree of knowledge, I lowered my head
and wept.
Suddenly I raised it again. Recovering my faith in my freedom by my freedom itself,
without reasoning, without hesitation, without any other gauge of the excellence of my nature
than this inner testimony that makes my soul created in the image of God and capable of
resisting him, since it should obey him, I said to myself, in the security of a superb solitude: This
is not so, I am free.5
And the chimera of necessity disappeared, similar to the phantoms formed during the
night by a play of shadow and light from the hearth, which immobilize the child with fear under
their flamboyant eyes, who is woken with a start, still half lost in a dream. Accomplice to the
magic spell, he ignores the fact that he held it together himself by the fixity of his point of view,
but as soon as he doubts it, he dispels it with a glance upon the first movement that he dares to
make.

5
Grenier’s note: Cf. the analysis placed by Renouvier at the end of Part 4 (infra, p. XX), where the
postulate of freedom is revealed; and also the fragments grouped under the title Postulatum (Jules Lequier,
Œuvres complètes, Éditions de la Baconnière, p. 385-401).