Have I gone too far in this portraiture of our times? I do not
anticipate this stricture, but rather another—that I have proved too
much by it. You will tell me that the picture I have presented resembles
the humanity of our day, but it also bodies forth all nations engaged in
the same degree of culture, because all, without exception, have fallen
off from nature by the abuse of reason, before they can return to it
through reason.
But if we bestow some serious attention to the character of our times,
we shall be astonished at the contrast between the present and the
previous form of humanity, especially that of Greece. We are justified
in claiming the reputation of culture and refinement, when contrasted
with a purely natural state of society, but not so comparing ourselves
with the Grecian nature. For the latter was combined with all the charms
of art and with all the dignity of wisdom, without, however, as with us,
becoming a victim to these influences. The Greeks have put us to shame
not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at
the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very
points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the
unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people
uniting at once fulness of form and fulness of substance, both
philosophizing and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a
youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.
At the period of Greek culture, which was an awakening of the powers of
the mind, the senses and the spirit had no distinctly separated
property; no division had yet torn them asunder, leading them to
partition in a hostile attitude, and to mark off their limits with
precision. Poetry had not as yet become the adversary of wit, nor had
speculation abused itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of
necessity both poetry and wit could exchange parts, because they both
honored truth only in their special way. However high might be the
flight of reason, it drew matter in a loving spirit after it, and while
sharply and stiffly defining it, never mutilated what it touched. It is
true the Greek mind displaced humanity, and recast it on a magnified
scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it did this not by
dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh combinations, for the
whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods. How different
is the course followed by us moderns! We also displace and magnify
individuals to form the image of the species, but we do this in a
fragmentary way, not by altered combinations, so that it is necessary to
gather up from different individuals the elements that form the species
in its totality. It would almost appear as if the powers of mind express
themselves with us in real life or empirically as separately as the
psychologist distinguishes them in the representation. For we see not
only individual subjects, but whole classes of men, uphold their
capacities only in part, while the rest of their faculties scarcely show
a germ of activity, as in the case of the stunted growth of plants.
I do not overlook the advantages to which the present race, regarded as
a unity and in the balance of the understanding, may lay claim over what
is best in the ancient world; but it is obliged to engage in the contest
as a compact mass, and measure itself as a whole against a whole. Who
among the moderns could step forth, man against man, and strive with an
Athenian for the prize of higher humanity.
Whence comes this disadvantageous relation of individuals coupled with
great advantages of the race? Why could the individual Greek be
qualified as the type of his time; and why can no modern dare to offer
himself as such? Because all-uniting nature imparted its forms to the
Greek, and an all-dividing understanding gives our forms to us.
It was culture itself that gave these wounds to modern humanity. The
inner union of human nature was broken, and a destructive contest
divided its harmonious forces directly; on the one hand, an enlarged
experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper
separation of the sciences, while, on the other hand, the more
complicated machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of
ranks and occupations. Intuitive and speculative understanding took up a
hostile attitude in opposite fields, whose borders were guarded with
jealousy and distrust; and by limiting its operation to a narrow sphere,
men have made unto themselves a master who is wont not unfrequently to
end by subduing and oppressing all the other faculties. Whilst on the
one hand a luxuriant imagination creates ravages in the plantations that
have cost the intelligence so much labor; on the other hand, a spirit of
abstraction suffocates the fire that might have warmed the heart and
inflamed the imagination.
This subversion, commenced by art and learning in the inner man, was
carried out to fulness and finished by the spirit of innovation in
government. It was, no doubt, reasonable to expect that the simple
organization of the primitive republics should survive the quaintness of
primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity. But, instead of
rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life, this organization
degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism. The zoophyte condition
of the Grecian states, where each individual enjoyed an independent
life, and could, in cases of necessity, become a separate whole and unit
in himself, gave way to an ingenious mechanism, when, from the splitting
up into numberless parts, there results a mechanical life in the
combination. Then there was a rupture between the state and the church,
between laws and customs; enjoyment was separated from labor, the means
from the end, the effort from the reward. Man himself, eternally chained
down to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment;
having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually
revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead
of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being
nothing more than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes
himself, of the science that he cultivates. This very partial and paltry
relation, linking the isolated members to the whole, does not depend on
forms that are given spontaneously; for how could a complicated machine,
which shuns the light, confide itself to the free will of man? This
relation is rather dictated, with a rigorous strictness, by a formulary
in which the free intelligence of man is chained down. The dead letter
takes the place of a living meaning, and a practised memory becomes a
safer guide than genius and feeling.
If the community or state measures man by his function, only asking of
its citizens memory, or the intelligence of a craftsman, or mechanical
skill, we cannot be surprised that the other faculties of the mind are
neglected for the exclusive culture of the one that brings in honor and
profit. Such is the necessary result of an organization that is
indifferent about character, only looking to acquirements, whilst in
other cases it tolerates the thickest darkness, to favor a spirit of law
and order; it must result if it wishes that individuals in the exercise
of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to
lose in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does
not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but
mediocre talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of
their feeble energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters
of preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of
things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar. Moreover, it
is rarely a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a capacity
superior to your employment, or one of those noble intellectual cravings
of a man of talent which contend in rivalry with the duties of office.
The state is so jealous of the exclusive possession of its servants that
it would prefer—nor can it be blamed in this—for functionaries to show
their powers with the Venus of Cytherea rather than the Uranian Venus.
It is thus that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that
the abstract whole may continue its miserable life, and the state
remains forever a stranger to its citizens, because feeling does not
discover it anywhere. The governing authorities find themselves
compelled to classify, and thereby simplify the multiplicity of
citizens, and only to know humanity in a representative form and at
second-hand. Accordingly they end by entirely losing sight of humanity,
and by confounding it with a simple artificial creation of the
understanding, whilst on their part the subject-classes cannot help
receiving coldly laws that address themselves so little to their
personality. At length, society, weary of having a burden that the state
takes so little trouble to lighten, falls to pieces and is broken up—a
destiny that has long since attended most European states. They are
dissolved in what may be called a state of moral nature, in which public
authority is only one function more, hated and deceived by those who
think it necessary, respected only by those who can do without it.
Thus compressed between two forces, within and without, could humanity
follow any other course than that which it has taken? The speculative
mind, pursuing imprescriptible goods and rights in the sphere of ideas,
must needs have become a stranger to the world of sense, and lose sight
of matter for the sake of form. On its part, the world of public
affairs, shut up in a monotonous circle of objects, and even there
restricted by formulas, was led to lose sight of the life and liberty of
the whole, while becoming impoverished at the same time in its own
sphere. Just as the speculative mind was tempted to model the real after
the intelligible, and to raise the subjective laws of its imagination
into laws constituting the existence of things, so the state spirit
rushed into the opposite extreme, wished to make a particular and
fragmentary experience the measure of all observation, and to apply
without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular craft.
The speculative mind had necessarily to become the prey of a vain
subtlety, the state spirit of a narrow pedantry; for the former was
placed too high to see the individual, and the latter too low to survey
the whole. But the disadvantage of this direction of mind was not
confined to knowledge and mental production; it extended to action and
feeling. We know that the sensibility of the mind depends, as to degree,
on the liveliness, and for extent on the richness of the imagination.
Now the predominance of the faculty of analysis must necessarily deprive
the imagination of its warmth and energy, and a restricted sphere of
objects must diminish its wealth. It is for this reason that the
abstract thinker has very often a _cold_ heart, because he analyzes
impressions, which only move the mind by their combination or totality;
on the other hand, the man of business, the statesman, has very often a
_narrow_ heart, because, shut up in the narrow circle of his employment,
his imagination can neither expand nor adapt itself to another manner of
viewing things.
My subject has led me naturally to place in relief the distressing
tendency of the character of our own times and to show the sources of
the evil, without its being my province to point out the compensations
offered by nature. I will readily admit to you that, although this
splitting up of their being was unfavorable for individuals, it was the
only open road for the progress of the race. The point at which we see
humanity arrived among the Greeks was undoubtedly a _maximum_; it could
neither stop there nor rise higher. It could not stop there, for the sum
of notions acquired forced infallibly the intelligence to break with
feeling and intuition, and to lead to clearness of knowledge. Nor could
it rise any higher; for it is only in a determinate measure that
clearness can be reconciled with a certain degree of abundance and of
warmth. The Greeks had attained this measure, and to continue their
progress in culture, they, as we, were obliged to renounce the totality
of their being, and to follow different and separate roads in order to
seek after truth.
There was no other way to develop the manifold aptitudes of man than to
bring them in opposition with one another. This antagonism of forces is
the great instrument of culture, but it is only an instrument: for as
long as this antagonism lasts man is only on the road to culture. It is
only because these special forces are isolated in man, and because they
take on themselves to impose an exclusive legislation, that they enter
into strife with the truth of things, and oblige common sense, which
generally adheres imperturbably to external phenomena, to dive into the
essence of things. While pure understanding usurps authority in the
world of sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect to the
conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the
highest possible development, and exhaust the whole extent of their
sphere. While, on the one hand, imagination, by its tyranny, ventures to
destroy the order of the world, it forces reason, on the other side, to
rise up to the supreme sources of knowledge, and to invoke against this
predominance of fancy the help of the law of necessity.
By an exclusive spirit in the case of his faculties, the individual is
fatally led to error; but the species is led to truth. It is only by
gathering up all the energy of our mind in a single focus, and
concentrating a single force in our being, that we give in some sort
wings to this isolated force, and that we draw it on artificially far
beyond the limits that nature seems to have imposed upon it. If it be
certain that all human individuals taken together would never have
arrived, with the visual power given them by nature, to see a satellite
of Jupiter, discovered by the telescope of the astronomer, it is just as
well established that never would the human understanding have produced
the analysis of the infinite, or the critique of pure reason, if in
particular branches, destined for this mission, reason had not applied
itself to special researches, and it, after having, as it were, freed
itself from all matter, it had not, by the most powerful abstraction
given to the spiritual eye of man the force necessary, in order to look
into the absolute. But the question is, if a spirit thus absorbed in
pure reason and intuition will be able to emancipate itself from the
rigorous fetters of logic, to take the free action of poetry, and seize
the individuality of things with a faithful and chaste sense? Here
nature imposes even on the most universal genius a limit it cannot pass,
and truth will make martyrs as long as philosophy will be reduced to
make its principal occupation the search for arms against errors.
But whatever may be the final profit for the totality of the world, of
this distinct and special perfecting of the human faculties, it cannot
be denied that this final aim of the universe, which devotes them to
this kind of culture, is a cause of suffering, and a kind of malediction
for individuals. I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form
athletic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play
of the limbs. In the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual
forces may make extraordinary men; but it is only the well-tempered
equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy and accomplished men.
And in what relation should we be placed with past and future ages if
the perfecting of human nature made such a sacrifice indispensable? In
that case we should have been the slaves of humanity, we should have
consumed our forces in servile work for it during some thousands of
years, and we should have stamped on our humiliated, mutilated nature
the shameful brand of this slavery—all this in order that future
generations, in a happy leisure, might consecrate themselves to the cure
of their moral health, and develop the whole of human nature by their
free culture.
But can it be true that man has to neglect himself for any end whatever?
Can nature snatch from us, for any end whatever, the perfection which is
prescribed to us by the aim of reason? It must be false that the
perfecting of particular faculties renders the sacrifice of their
totality necessary; and even if the law of nature had imperiously this
tendency, we must have the power to reform by a superior art this
totality of our being, which art has destroyed.