_Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious
is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is
contemptible._
Note that what is new in this crusade against individualism (the great
apostle of which is M. Maurras) is not the recognition that ‘the
individual is only an abstraction’, that to a great extent, he is
formed by his race, his surroundings, his nation, a thousand things
which are not himself. The novelty is the cult for this servitude, the
order given to mankind to submit entirely to it, the contempt shown
for any attempt to get free from it. Once again this is the cult (so
strange in French thinkers) for the _inevitable_ part of the human
being, the hatred for its free part.
Note that those who to-day preach obedience of the mind, not only
demand it from the uncultured masses but from the men of thought,
_especially_ from the men of thought. The anti-individualists of the
Dreyfus affair particularly opposed the independence of scientists,
writers, and philosophers--‘the mad vanity of a few intellectuals’.
Nevertheless, the most curious thing is not that they require this
obedience, but that they obtain it. When M. Maritain declares that
‘everyone cannot philosophize and that, for men, the essential thing
is to choose a master’, and when M. Maurras asserts that the function
of most minds is to be ‘servants’ and to reflect the thought of some
leader, these teachers find a number of men of thought to applaud and
abdicate their liberty of mind in their favour. The thinkers of the
eighteenth century said: ‘A religion is needed for the people.’ Those
of our age say: ‘A religion is needed for ourselves.’ What Barrès
wrote: ‘The part of the masters is to justify the habits and prejudices
of France, so as best to prepare our children to take their place in
the national procession,’ he certainly meant that he and his colleagues
were to walk in this procession. Here we again come upon that thirst
for discipline which I spoke of above and which seemed to me so worthy
of remark in the descendants of Montaigne and Renan. The cause, I said,
was their desire to belong to a ‘strong group’. In them it also arises
from a feeling for the artistic value of regimenting a collection of
men in a beautiful ‘procession’, and also from the joy felt by so many
souls in being governed, if not having to make the effort to think for
themselves--a most curious joy in so-called men of thought.
The cult for the collective soul, with all its violation of human
consciousness, seems to me admirably denounced by a passage of Maine
de Biran, quoted by M. L. Brunschvicg (op. cit., _La Sociologie de
l’ordre_, p. 526):--
‘... According to M. Bonald, it is not the human mind, it is not
the individual understanding which is the seat, the true subject of
inherence of the nations or (universal) truths under discussion; but
it is society, which, gifted with a kind of collective understanding
different from that of individuals, was from its origin imbued with
them through the gift of speech and by virtue of a miraculous influence
exerted on the mass alone, independent of its parts. The individual,
the man, is nothing; society alone exists; society is the soul of
the moral world, it alone exists, while individual persons are only
phenomena. Let those who can, understand this social metaphysics. If
the author himself understands it clearly, then I am in the wrong.
Then we must cease to talk of philosophy and recognize the nothingness
of the science of intellectual and moral man, we must admit that all
psychology based on the primitive fact of consciousness is simply
false, and we must consider science itself as an illusion which
perpetually deceives and misleads us by showing us everything, even our
own existence, in a false and fantastic light.’
M. Brunschvicg very rightly adds: ‘The antithesis could not be stated
more clearly. Either the primary fact of consciousness, or the primary
fact of language; either Socrates or Bonald.’
Either Socrates or Bonald. Barrès and Maurras made their choice.