Part II.
[36] According to an ancient tradition handed down from Egypt to Greece, a God inimical to men’s repose was the inventor of the sciences. What, then, must the Egyptians themselves, among whom the sciences were born, have thought of them! It is that they saw near at hand the sources that had brought them forth. Indeed, regardless of whether one consults the annals of the world or supplements uncertain chronicles with philosophical inquiries, the origin of human knowledge will not be found to correspond to the idea one likes to conceive regarding it. Astronomy was born of superstition; Eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; Geometry of greed; Physics of a vain curiosity; all of them, even Ethics, of human pride. The Sciences and the Arts thus owe their birth to our vices; we should be less in doubt regarding their advantages if they owed it to our virtues.
[37] Their flawed origin is all too clearly mirrored for us in their objects. What would we do with the Arts, without luxury to sustain them? Without men’s injustices, what would be the use of Jurisprudence? What would become of History if there were neither Tyrants, nor Wars, nor Conspirators? In short, who would want to spend his life in barren contemplations if everyone consulted only man’s duties and nature’s needs, and had time only for the Fatherland, for the unfortunate, and for one’s friends? Are we, then, destined to die tied to the edge of the well into which truth has withdrawn? This reflection alone should from the very outset deter anyone seriously trying to educate himself by studying Philosophy.
[38] How many dangers! How many wrong roads in the investigation of the Sciences? Through how many errors, a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful, must one not make one’s way in order to reach it? The drawback is manifest; for falsehood admits of an infinite number of combinations; but truth has only one way of being. Besides, who seeks it altogether sincerely? Even with the best will, by what indices is one sure to recognize it? Amid this host of different sentiments, what shall be our criterion for it? And, most difficult of all, if we should have the good fortune of finally finding it, who of us will know how to use it well?
[39] While our sciences are vain as regards their aims, they are even more dangerous in their effects. Born in idleness, they feed it in turn; and the irreparable loss of time is the first injury they necessarily inflict on society. In politics, as in morals, not to do good is a great evil, and every useless citizen may be looked upon as a pernicious man. Answer me then, illustrious Philosophers, you to whom we owe it to know in what ratios bodies attract one another in a vacuum; the proportions between areas swept in equal times by the revolutions of the planets; which curves have conjugate points, which have inflection points, and which cusps; how man sees everything in God; how soul and body agree without communicating, as would two clocks; what stars may be inhabited; what insects reproduce in an uncommon way. Answer me, I say, you from whom we have received so much sublime knowledge; if you had never taught us any of these things, would we have been any the less numerous for it, any the less well governed, the less formidable, the less flourishing or the more perverse? Reconsider the importance of your achievements, then; and if the labors of our most enlightened learned men and our best Citizens provide us with so little that is useful, tell us what we are to think of that host of obscure Writers and idle Literati who devour the State’s substance at a pure loss.
[40] What am I saying; idle? would to God they indeed were! Morals would be healthier and society more peaceful. But these vain and futile declaimers go off in all directions, armed with their deadly paradoxes; undermining the foundations of faith, and annihilating virtue. They smile disdainfully at such old-fashioned words as Fatherland and Religion, and dedicate their talents and their Philosophy to destroying and degrading all that is sacred among men. Not that at bottom they hate either virtue or our dogmas; their enemy is public opinion; and in order to return them to the feet of the altars, one need only banish them among the Atheists. O rage for distinction, what will you not do?
[41] The abuse of time is a great evil. Other, even worse evils follow in the wake of Letters and Arts. One of these is luxury, born, like they, of men’s idleness and vanity. Luxury is seldom found without the sciences and the arts, and they are never found without it. I know that our Philosophy, ever fertile in singular maxims, contends, in the face of the experience of all centuries, that luxury makes for the splendor of States; but after forgetting that sumptuary laws are necessary, will it also dare deny that good morals are essential for Empires to endure, and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good morals? Granting that luxury is a certain sign of riches; that, if you like, it even serves to increase them: What conclusion is to be drawn from this paradox so worthy of being born in our time; and what will become of virtue, when one will have to get rich at all cost? The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money. One will tell you that in one country a man is worth the sum for which he would be sold in Algiers; another, pursuing this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They appraise men like herds of cattle. According to them a man is worth to the State only what he consumes in it. By this token one Sybarite would easily have been worth thirty Lacedaemonians. Try to guess, then, which of the two Republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was subdued by a handful of peasants, and which caused Asia to tremble.
[42] The Monarchy of Cyrus was conquered with thirty thousand men by a Prince poorer than the least of the Persian Satraps; and the Scythians, the most miserable of all Peoples, resisted the most powerful Monarchs of the Universe. Two famed Republics contended for the Empire of the World; one was very rich, and the other had nothing, and it was the latter which destroyed the first. The Roman Empire, having swallowed all the riches of the Universe, in its turn fell prey to men who did not so much as know what riches were. The Franks conquered the Gauls, the Saxons conquered England with no other treasures than their bravery and their poverty. A band of poor Mountaineers whose entire greed was limited to a few sheepskins, having tamed Austrian pride, went on to crush the opulent and formidable House of Burgundy before which the Potentates of Europe trembled. Finally, all the power and wisdom of Charles the Fifth’s heir, backed by all the treasures of the Indies, could not defeat a handful of herring fishers. Let our politicians deign to suspend their calculations in order to reflect on these examples, and learn once and for all that with money one has everything, except morals and Citizens.
[43] What, then, precisely is at issue in this question of luxury? To know what matters most to Empires, to be brilliant and short-lived, or virtuous and long-lasting. I say brilliant, but by what luster? A taste for ostentation is scarcely ever combined in the same souls with a taste for the honest. No, Minds debased by a host of futile cares cannot possibly ever rise to anything great; and even if they had the requisite strength, they would lack the courage.
[44] Every Artist wants to be applauded. His contemporaries’ praise is the most precious portion of his reward. What, then, will he do to obtain it, if he has the misfortune to be born among a People and at a time when the Learned, having become fashionable, have placed frivolous youths in the position of setting the tone; when men have sacrificed their taste to the Tyrants of their freedom; when masterpieces of dramatic Poetry are dropped [from repertories], and marvels of harmony rejected because one of the sexes dares to approve only of what suits the other’s pusillanimity? What will he do, Gentlemen? He will lower his genius to the level of his century, and compose popular works that are admired during his lifetime, rather than marvels that would be admired only long after his death. Tell us, famed Arouet, how many manly and strong beauties you have sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how many great things the spirit of gallantry that is so prolific in small things has cost you?
[45] This is how the dissolution of morals, the necessary consequence of luxury, in turn leads to the corruption of taste. If, by chance, someone among the men of extraordinary talents were steadfast of soul and refused to yield to the genius of his century and to debase himself by puerile productions, woe betide him! He will die in poverty and oblivion. Would that I were making a prediction and not reporting an experience! Carle, Pierre; the time has come when the brush intended to enhance the majesty of our Temples with sublime and holy images will either drop from your hands, or be prostituted to decorate the panels of a carriage with lascivious pictures. And you, the rival of the likes of Praxiteles and of Phidias; you whose chisel the ancients would have employed to make them such Gods as would have excused their idolatry in our eyes; inimitable Pigal, either your hand will consent to burnish the belly of some grotesque figurine, or it will have to remain idle.
[46] One cannot reflect on morals, without taking delight in recalling the image of the simplicity of the first times. It is a fair shore, adorned by the hands of nature alone, toward which one forever turns one’s eyes, and from which one feels oneself moving away with regret. When innocent and virtuous men liked to have the Gods for witnesses of their deeds, they lived together in the same huts; but having soon become wicked, they wearied of these inconvenient onlookers and banished them to magnificent Temples. At last they drove them out of the Temples in order to settle in them themselves, or at least the Temples of the Gods became indistinguishable from the homes of the citizens. That was the period of the utmost depravity; and the vices were never carried to a greater pitch than when they were, so to speak, seen borne up on columns of marble and carved on Corinthian capitals at the entrance to the Palaces of the Great.
[47] While the conveniences of life increase, the arts improve, and luxury spreads; true courage is enervated, the military virtues vanish, and this too is the work of the sciences and of all the arts that are practiced in the closeness of the study. When the Goths ravaged Greece, the Libraries were saved from fire only because of the opinion spread by one of them, that the enemy should be left furnishings so well suited to distract them from military exercise and to keep them amused with idle and sedentary occupations. Charles the Eighth found himself master of Tuscany and of the Kingdom of Naples almost without having drawn sword; and his entire Court attributed this unexpected ease to the fact that the Italian Princes and Nobility amused themselves more trying to become ingenious and learned, than they exerted themselves trying to become vigorous and warlike. Indeed, says the sensible man who reports these two episodes, all examples teach us that in this martial polity as well as in all others like it the study of the sciences is much more apt to soften and effeminate men’s courage than to strengthen and animate it.
[48] The Romans admitted that military virtue died out among them in proportion as they began to be knowledgeable about Paintings, Etchings, Goldsmiths’ vessels, and to cultivate the fine arts; and as if this famous land had been destined forever to serve as an example to the other peoples, the rise of the Medicis and the restoration of Letters destroyed once more and perhaps forever the martial reputation which, a few centuries ago, Italy seemed to have recovered.
[49] The ancient Republics of Greece, with the wisdom that was so conspicuous in most of their institutions, had forbidden their Citizens the exercise of all those quiet and sedentary occupations which, by allowing the body to grow slack and corrupted, soon enervate the vigor of the soul. How, indeed, can men overwhelmed by the least need and repelled by the least pain be expected to face up to hunger, thirst, fatigues, dangers, and death. With what courage will soldiers bear up under extreme labors to which they are in no way accustomed? With what spirit will they go on forced marches under Officers who have not even the strength to travel on horseback? Do not cite the renowned valor of all these scientifically trained modern warriors as an objection against me. I hear praised their bravery on a day of battle, but I am not told how they bear up under extreme labors, how they withstand the harshness of the seasons and the inclemencies of the weather. A little sunshine or a little snow, the want of a few superfluities, is enough to melt and destroy the best of our armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors, suffer, for once, the truth which you so rarely hear; you are brave, I know; you would have triumphed with Hannibal at Cannae and at Trasimene; with you Caesar would have crossed the Rubicon and reduced his country to servitude; but it is not with you that the one would have crossed the Alps, and the other vanquished your ancestors.
[50] Success in battles does not always make for success in war, and there is for Generals an art higher than that of winning battles. A man may run boldly into the line of fire, and yet be a very bad officer; even a [common] soldier may need a little more strength and vigor than all that bravery which does not protect him from death; and what difference does it make to the State whether its troops die by fever and cold, or by the enemy’s sword?
[51] While the cultivation of the sciences is harmful to the martial qualities, it is even more so to the moral qualities. From our very first years a senseless education adorns our mind and corrupts our judgment. Everywhere I see huge establishments, in which young people are brought up at great expense to learn everything except their duties. Your children will not know their own language, but will speak others that are nowhere in use: they will know how to write Verses they will hardly be able to understand: without being able to disentangle error from truth, they will possess the art of making them unrecognizable to others by specious arguments: but they will not know the meaning of the words magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage; the sweet name Fatherland will never strike their ear; and if they hear God spoken of at all, it will be less to be in awe than to be in fear of him. I would as soon, said a Wise man, that my pupil had spent his time on the Tennis Court, at least his body would have been the more fit for it. I know that children have to be kept busy, and that idleness is the danger most to be feared for them. What then should they learn? That is certainly a fine question! Let them learn what they ought to do when they are men; and not what they ought to forget.
[52] Our gardens are adorned with statues and our Galleries with paintings. What would you think these masterpieces of art exhibited for public admiration represent? The defenders of the Fatherland? or those still greater men who enriched it with their virtues? No. They are images of all the aberrations of the heart and of the reason, carefully culled from ancient Mythology, and presented to our children’s curiosity at an early age; no doubt so that they might have models of bad deeds before their eyes, even before they can read.
[53] What gives rise to all of these abuses, if not the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the disparagement of the virtues? This is the most obvious effect of all our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. People no longer ask about a man whether he has probity, but whether he has talents; nor about a Book whether it is useful, but whether it is well written. Rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine deeds. Yet, I should like to be told whether the glory attaching to the best of the discourses that will be crowned by this Academy is comparable to the merit of having endowed the prize?
[54] The wise man does not run after fortune; but he is not insensitive to glory; and when he sees it so badly distributed, his virtue, which a little emulation would have animated and turned to the advantage of society, languishes and dies in misery and oblivion. This is what, in the long run, must everywhere result from the preference for the agreeable over the useful talents, and what experience has only all too fully confirmed since the revival of the sciences and arts. We have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens; or if we still have some left, scattered in our abandoned countryside, they waste away indigent and despised. Such is the condition to which those who give us bread and our children milk are reduced, and such are our attitudes toward them.
[55] Nevertheless, I admit that the evil is not as great as it might have become. Eternal foresight, by placing medicinal herbs next to various noxious plants, and the remedy against their wounds into the substance of a number of harmful animals, has taught Sovereigns who are its ministers to imitate its wisdom. By following its example, the great Monarch whose glory will only acquire renewed luster with every succeeding age drew, from the very bosom of the sciences and arts, the sources of a thousand aberrations, those famous societies that are charged both with the dangerous trust of human knowledge and the sacred trust of morals, by the care they take to preserve knowledge and morals in all their purity among themselves, and to require that the members they admit do so as well.
[56] These wise institutions, strengthened by his august successor, and imitated by all the Kings of Europe, will at least act as curbs on men of letters who, since they all aspire to the honor of being admitted to the Academies, will watch themselves, and strive to make themselves worthy of it by useful works and irreproachable morals. Those among these Associations that will select for prize competitions honoring literary merit, topics apt to revive the love of virtue in Citizens’ hearts, will show that such love reigns among them, and give Peoples the altogether rare and sweet pleasure of seeing learned societies dedicated to disseminating not only agreeable enlightenment, but also salutary teachings among Mankind.
[57] Therefore, do not urge as an objection against me what I regard as but one more proof. So many precautions all too clearly show the need for them, and no one looks for remedies to nonexistent evils. Why should they be regarded as no more than common remedies just because they are inadequate? So many organizations established for the benefit of the learned are all the more apt to make the objects of the sciences appear impressive and to direct men’s minds to their cultivation. To judge by the precautions being taken, it would appear that there is a surplus of Farmers and fear of a shortage of Philosophers. I do not wish here to venture a comparison between agriculture and philosophy, it would not be tolerated. I will only ask, what is Philosophy? What do the writings of the best-known philosophers contain? What are the Lessons of these lovers of wisdom? To listen to them, might one not take them for a troupe of charlatans, each hawking from his own stand on a public square; Come to me, I am the only one who does not deceive? One claims that there are no bodies and that everything is in idea. Another, that there is no substance other than matter and no God other than the world. This one urges that there are neither virtues nor vices, and that moral good and evil are chimeras. That other, that men are wolves and may devour one another in good conscience. O great Philosophers! why do you not confine these profitable Lessons for your friends and your children; you would soon reap the reward for them, and we would not have to fear finding one of your followers among our own friends and children.
[58] These, then, are the wonderful men on whom the esteem of their contemporaries was lavished during their lifetimes, and for whom immortality was reserved after their deaths! These are the wise maxims we have received from them and which we will transmit from age to age to our descendants. Did Paganism, given to all the aberrations of human reason, leave to posterity anything comparable to the shameful memorials which Printing has readied for it in the reign of the Gospel? The impious writings of such men as Leucippus and Diagoras perished with them. The art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind had not yet been invented. But thanks to Typography and to the use to which we put it, the dangerous reveries of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever. Go, famed writings of which our Forefathers’ ignorance and rusticity would have been incapable; go to our descendants in company with those still more dangerous works that exude the corruption of our century’s morals, and together transmit to future centuries a faithful history of the progress and the benefits of our sciences and our arts. If they read you, you will leave them in no doubt regarding the question we are debating today: and unless they are more devoid of sense than we are, they will raise their hands to Heaven and with a bitter heart say: “Almighty God, you who hold all Minds in your hands, deliver us from our Fathers’ Enlightenment and fatal arts, and restore us to ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods that can make for our happiness and that are precious in your sight.”
[59] But if the progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our genuine felicity; if it has corrupted our morals, and if the corruption of morals has injured purity of taste, what are we to think of that crowd of Popularizers who have removed the difficulties that guarded the access to the Temple of the Muses, and that nature had placed there as a trial of the strength of those who might be tempted to know? What are we to think of those Anthologizers of works that have indiscreetly broken down the gate of the Sciences and introduced into their Sanctuary a populace unworthy of coming near it; whereas what would have been desirable is to have had all those who could not go far in a career in Letters deterred from the outset, and become involved in Arts useful to society? Someone who his whole life long will remain a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer, might perhaps have become a great clothier. Those whom nature intended as its disciples needed no teachers. The Verulams, the Descartes and the Newtons, these Preceptors of Mankind, had none themselves, and indeed what guides could have led them as far as their vast genius carried them? Ordinary Masters could only have shrunk their understanding by cramping it within the narrow scope of their own: The first obstacles taught them to exert themselves, and to practice covering the immense distance which they traveled. If a few men are to be allowed to devote themselves to the study of the Sciences and the Arts, it must be only those who feel they have the strength to go forth alone in their footsteps, and to overtake them: It belongs to this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. But if one wants nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing should be beyond their hopes. This is the only encouragement they need. The soul insensibly proportions itself to the objects that occupy it, and it is great occasions that make great men. The Prince of Eloquence was Consul of Rome, and the greatest, perhaps, of Philosophers, Lord Chancellor of England. Is it likely that if the one had merely occupied a chair in some University, and the other received but a modest pension from an Academy; is it likely, I say, that their works would not have reflected their station? Let Kings therefore not disdain admitting into their councils the people most capable of counseling them well: let them reject the old prejudice invented by the pride of the Great, that the art of leading Peoples is more difficult than that of enlightening them: as if it were easier to move men to act well of their own accord than it is to compel them to do so by force. Let learned men of the first rank find honorable asylum in their courts. Let them there receive the only reward worthy of them; by the credit they enjoy, to contribute to the happiness of the Peoples to whom they will have taught wisdom. Only then will it be possible to see what virtue, science and authority, animated by a noble emulation and working in concert for the felicity of Mankind, can do. But as long as power remains by itself on one side; enlightenment and wisdom by themselves on the other; the learned will rarely think of great things, Princes will even more rarely perform fine ones, and Peoples will continue to be base, corrupt, and unhappy.
[60] As for ourselves, vulgar men, to whom Heaven has not vouchsafed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not run after a reputation which would escape us, and which, in the present state of things, would never restore to us what it would have cost us, even if we were fully entitled to obtain it. What good is it to seek our happiness in other people’s opinion if we can find it within ourselves? Let us leave to others the care of instructing Peoples in their duties, and confine ourselves to fulfilling our own duties well, we have no need of knowing more.
[61] O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many efforts and so much equipment really required to know you? Are not your principles engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough in order to learn your Laws to return into oneself and to listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the passions? That is genuine Philosophy, let us know how to rest content with it; and without envying the glory of those famous men who render themselves immortal in the Republic of Letters, let us try to place between them and ourselves the glorious distinction formerly seen between two great Peoples; that the one knew how to speak well, and the other, to act well.