DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND
Despite all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued
his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of
fellowship. On the day when peace was signed, June 26, 1919, he
published in "_L'Humanité_" a manifesto composed by himself and
subscribed by sympathizers of all nationalities. In a world falling to
ruin, it was to be the cornerstone of the invisible temple, the refuge
of the disillusioned. With masterly touch Rolland sums up the past, and
displays it as a warning to the future. He issues a clarion call.
"Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for
five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the
warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being
reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union,
and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly
built than that which previously existed.
"The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed
their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the
governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any
reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the
elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in
the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us
for the future!
"First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from
the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and
from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers,
artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the
plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal
of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought
reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding
and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled,
debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They
have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance)
they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or
social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the
fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and
the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom
of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their
access of mania--now, Thought, which has been entangled in their
struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Original manuscript of _The Declaration of the
Independence of the Mind_]
"Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy
alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is
we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to
bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed
sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to
point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night.
Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice;
we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of
race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we
work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know
the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which
struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which
continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and
its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that
they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their
blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant--Mind, which is free, one and
manifold, eternal."
Many hundreds of persons have signed this manifesto, for leading spirits
in every land accept the message and make it their own. The invisible
republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established
among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who
wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only
enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his
home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is
the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforward he is an
indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and
the universal future.