Zangwill

Zangwill

The cahier that one is about to read has been brought to us just as it is by the translator, Mademoiselle Mathilde Salomon, directress of the Collège Sévigné, 10, rue de Condé, Paris sixth; the name of the translator and her standing amply recommended the cahier; the name of the author is not yet known to the French public; it was totally unknown to me.

When we do not know the name of an author, we begin by mistrusting; and by panicking; we grow uneasy; we run for information; we find ourselves ignorant; we are uneasy; we ask right and left; we lose our time; we run to dictionaries, to manuals, or to those men who are themselves dictionaries and manuals, ambulant; and we do not regain peace of soul until we have established, of the author, in the greatest detail, a good biography, cataloged, analytic, summary.

This is a modern idea; this is a method altogether contemporary, altogether recent; it can appear to us ancient, and acquired, and already traditional, to us normaliens and university men of the present time, only because we have contracted the bad scholastic habit of not considering a sufficiently vast space of time when we reflect on the history of humanity.

Much more than we want, much more than we believe, much more than we say, all of us formed by scholastic habits, all of us drilled by scholastic disciplines, all of us limited by scholastic limitations and conveniences, we all believe more or less obscurely that humanity begins at the modern world, that the intelligence of humanity begins at the modern methods; happy when we do not believe, with all the secularists, with all the primary schoolteachers, that France begins exactly the first of January seventeen hundred and eighty-nine, at six o’clock in the morning.

Now the modern idea, the modern method comes back essentially to this: a work being given, a text being given, how do we come to know it; let us begin by not seizing the text; above all let us take great care not to lay hands on the text; nor to cast eyes upon it; that is the end; if ever one gets there; let us begin by the beginning, or rather, since one must be complete, let us begin by the beginning of the beginning; the beginning of the beginning is, in the immense, in the moving, in the universal, in the total reality, very exactly the point of knowledge having some relation to the text which is the most distant from the text; that if one can even begin from a point of knowledge totally foreign to the text, absolutely incommunicable, in order from there to pass by the longest possible road to the point of knowledge having some relation to the text which is the most distant from the text, then we obtain the very crowning of the scientific method, we manufacture a masterpiece of the modern spirit; and the more the starting-point of the beginning of the beginning of the work shall be distant, if possible foreign, the more the approach shall have come from afar, and bizarre; — the more shall we be scientists, historians, and savants modern.

Have we to study, do we propose to study La Fontaine; instead of beginning with the first fable that comes to mind, we shall begin with the Gallic spirit; the sky; the soil; the climate; the foods; the race; the primitive literature; then the man; his mores; his tastes; his dependence; his independence; his goodness; his childhoods; his genius; then the writer; his classical gropings; his Gallic escapades; his epic; his morality; then the writer, continued; opposition in France of culture and nature; reconciliation in La Fontaine of culture and nature; how the poetic faculty serves as intermediary; all that to make the first part, the artist; to make the second part, the personages, which we do not confound with the first, first the men; French society in the seventeenth century and in La Fontaine; the king; the court: the nobility; the clergy; the bourgeoisie; the artisan; the peasant; poetic characters; then the beasts; the sentiment of nature in the seventeenth century and in La Fontaine; of the poetic procedure; then the gods; the religious sentiment in the seventeenth century and in La Fontaine; of the poetic faculty; finally the third part, the art, which is not confounded either with the two first together, or with each of the two first separately; the action; the details; comparison of La Fontaine and his originals, Aesop and Phaedrus; the system; comparison of La Fontaine and his originals, Aesop, Rabelais, Pilpay, Cassandre; the expression; of picturesque style; the proper words; the familiar words; the risky words; the neglected words; the broken meter; the varied meter; the imitative meter; of linked style; the logical unity; the grammatical unity; the musical unity; finally theory of the poetic fable; nature of poetry; opposition of the philosophical fable to the poetic fable; opposition of the primitive fable to the poetic fable; that is all; I ask myself with terror where in all this shall reside the fable itself; where shall hide, in all this magnificent geometrical palace, the little fable, where I shall find it, the fable of La Fontaine; it shall find no asylum there, for the author, in all this apparatus, would not recognize his children.

Or rather that is not all, for during fifty years we have made progress; — is not progress the great law of modern society; — that is not the whole of today; today who would dare begin La Fontaine otherwise than by a general lesson of anthropogeography.

All that would be quite good if we were gods, or, to speak exactly, all that would be quite fine if we were God; for if we wish to evaluate the qualities, the capacities, the amplitudes that such methods demand of us in order to lead us to the acquisition of any knowledge, we immediately recognize that the qualities, capacities, amplitudes attributed to the ancient gods by the mythologizing peoples would be absolutely insufficient today to constitute the true historian, the scientific man, — vir scientificus, — the modern savant; it is not enough that the modern savant be a god; he must be God; since one wishes to begin with the indefinite, infinite series of detail; since one wishes to start from an indefinitely, infinitely distant, foreign point, since before arriving at the very text one wishes to traverse an indefinite, infinite road, in order to exhaust all this indefinite, all this infinite, the very infinity of God is required, of a personal or impersonal God, of a pantheistic, theistic or deistic God, but absolutely of an infinite God; and we touch here upon one of the gravest interior contrarieties of the modern world, one of the most poignant interior contrarieties of the modern spirit.

While the modern scientistic demagogues congratulate one another, decorate themselves, drink and triumph in banquets, the modern world is interiorly gnawed, the modern spirit is interiorly worked by the most profound contrarieties; and humanity would be as wrong to rivet itself to what we today name the modern world and the modern spirit and modern science as it has been right not to rivet itself to anterior forms of life, today supposedly surpassed; in the order of knowledge, of history, of biography and of the text, we are in particular led to the following singular contrariety.

The polytheistic and mythologizing humanities, having, even in the order of divinity, excellently, eminently the sense of the perfect, of the finite, of the limit, had it in particular in the order of humanity; shall I add that these humanities were generally intelligent, and that they did not live upon interior contrarieties without having registered them; in these humanities man was recognized as limited to human limits; and the historian remained a man.

The pantheistic and generally theistic humanities had, in the order of divinity, excellently, eminently the sense of the infinite, of the absolute, of the all; but precisely because they had the sense of the all as all, they had the sense of modest humanity as being in its particular place within this all; they knew the limitations of humanity; they referred, compared unceasingly humanity to the rest; and to the all; shall I add that these humanities were generally profound, and that they did not live upon interior contrarieties without having known them by the profound ways of instinct; in these humanities man was recognized as part and limited to the human limits; the historian remained a man.

The deist and particularly Christian humanities, those singular humanities, which appear to us ordinary and common only because we are habituated to them, those singular humanities, where man occupies toward God so singular a situation of greatness and of misery, so audacious at bottom, and so superhuman, — man made in the image and the likeness of God, — and God made man, — had separately the sense of the perfect and of the imperfect, of the finite and of the infinite, of the relative and of the absolute; they knew therefore the limitations of humanity; shall I add that generally these humanities were at once intelligent and profound, and that the very observation of the interior contrarieties, of the greatness and the misery, formed perhaps the principal object of their meditations; in these humanities man was recognized as creature and limited to the human limits; the historian remained a man.

By an unforeseen interior contrariety, and new in the history of humanity, it had to be precisely the modern world, the modern spirit, the modern methods that had to be reached, for the historian really to cease considering himself a man.

The modern world, the modern spirit, secular, positivist and atheist, democratic, political and parliamentary, the modern methods, modern science, the modern man, believe themselves to have got rid of God; and in reality, for him who looks a little beyond appearances, for him who wishes to go beyond formulas, never has man been so encumbered with God.

When man found himself in the presence of avowed, qualified, recognized gods, and so to speak notified, he could clearly remain a man; precisely because God was named God, man could name himself man; whether they were human or superhuman gods, an All-God or a personal God, God being put in his place as God, our man could remain in his place as man; by a truly novel irony, it is precisely in the age when man believes himself emancipated, in the age when man believes himself rid of all the gods, that he himself no longer keeps to his place as man and that on the contrary he encumbers himself with all the ancient Gods; eaters of the good God, that is the popular formula of our anti-Catholic demagogues; they have themselves absorbed many more good Gods, and bad Gods, than they think.

In the face of the gods of Olympus, in the face of an All-God, in the face of the Christian God, the historian was a man, remained a man; in the face of nothing, in the face of zero God, the old pride has done its office; the human spirit has lost its bearings; the compass has gone mad; the modern historian has become a God; he has made himself, half unconsciously, half complacently, himself a God; I do not say a god like our frivolous, insensible and deaf, impotent, mutilated gods; he has made himself God, quite simply, eternal God, absolute God, all-powerful God, all-just and omniscient.

This affirmation which I make will fill with sincere stupor a rather great number of good people who modestly, from morning to evening, play with the absolute, and who never suspect it; how, they will say in all sincerity, how can one suppose us to have such intentions; we are little professors; we are modest and honest university men; we hold no situation in the State; we are rather ill-treated by our superiors; we have no power in the State; we determine no events; we are the worst-paid of functionaries; nobody hears us; we modestly pursue our inquiry upon men and upon past events; by situation, by trade, by method, we have neither vanity nor pride, nor presumption, nor cupidity for domination; the invention of modern historical methods has been properly the introduction of modesty into the historical domain.

It is exactly there that lies the great modern error.

The priests too were little abbés and little curés; modest and honest ecclesiastics; they held no situation in the State, for the little country curés were no more than our schoolmasters are today, and our great prelates of teaching, demagogues, deputies, ministers, senators, are no less than the great bishops and the great cardinals once were; no later than the day before yesterday, in its issue dated Saturday October 15, 1904, la Petite République, having to interrogate M. Gabriel Séailles upon the separation of the Churches and of the State, employed for the purposes of this inquiry, through the ministry of M. Henry Honorat, expressions which seem to me marked with a truly religious respect: “in Paris, before his work-table,” the journalist tells us, “in the midst of his books and his notebooks, M. Gabriel Séailles told me, in an amiable and sympathetic chat, more or less the same things in more or less the same terms.”

— Amiable, in these grave questions; well, well.

“Two young men, two of his disciples, were listening with me.”

— I assure you, Monsieur the journalist, that you are mistaken; there is not, in the public square, a philosophy which is properly the philosophy of M. Séailles, and so there are not any disciples of M. Séailles; it is Jesus-Christ who had disciples; M. Séailles forms pupils, quite simply.

“M. Gabriel Séailles loves these familiar conversations where his charming good humor takes pleasure.

“And you know it well, friends of the popular universities; for the master who consecrated so many fine pages to the ‘psychological biography’ of Ernest Renan and who, by his discourses and his writings, has made us know better the enchanting brushes of the immortal Watteau,”…

One says the brush, usually; it is true that he had several.

“comes down for you from his too-high chair, and, why not say it? his too-universitarian chair of the Sorbonne, in order to teach you, philosopher and artist, and poet, wisdom and beauty.”

It is a fine program. Here the drawn portrait of M. Gabriel Séailles.

“Thus, now sketching a white sheet, before him, on the blotter, and now rubbing his hands one against the other with vivacity, or rolling in his fingers, and twisting, and bruising some wretched bristol or other, his gaze laughing through the double glass of the pince-nez well placed on the strong nose, the broad forehead, the cascading graying beard at the chin, and the feet warmly wrapped in slippers, M. Gabriel Séailles pursued:”

I am assured that such a tone, such expressions much displease M. Gabriel Séailles; I shall not insist upon what the detailed description of all these conveniences of the present conversation has of the disobliging when one settles down to treat of a debate which painfully divides consciences; I am assured that M. Séailles feels much more keenly than I how unsuitable these expressions are; for me they appear to me quite simply unbearable; impenitent libertarian, I find therein, I hear therein a whole resonance of religious respect; we have nevertheless taken a minimum example; and in this minimum example there are disastrous expressions, like a too-high chair, and from which one comes down; evidently the journalist wishes to give the People the idea that M. Séailles’s chair at the Sorbonne is super-popular, superhuman, that extraordinary events take place there, and that, at bottom, the orator pronounces there supernatural words; what resonance would we not have obtained if we had chosen a maximum example, and even common examples; have the secular manifestations not become wholly religious ceremonies, replicas, imitations, tracings, counterfeits of religious ceremonies; and for the commemoration of Zola, for the anniversary of his death, have they not given us a holy week, a novena: religious sentiment and the birth of demagogy.

The priests too, the little priests, in this sense, held no situation in the State, had no power in the State; the priests too were rather ill-treated by their superiors and determined no events; the priests too were the worst-paid of functionaries, and nobody heard them; and when they shall no longer be ill-paid functionaries of the State, they shall be ill-paid functionaries of the Church; and nobody shall hear them; they pursue modestly their preaching of the future life; by situation, by trade, by Christian humility they have neither vanity nor pride, nor presumption nor cupidity for domination; a country curé is a little lord; the exercise of the ecclesiastical ministry is essentially an exercise of Christian humility.

I do not say that this is true of the priests; I say that, as much as and in the sense that this is true of the university men, if one will, as much and in the same sense, mutations made, this is true of the priests; if the excuse of modesty is valid for the functionaries of teaching, the excuse of Christian humility is valid for the ecclesiastical functionaries.

Yet these priests administer God himself; let us examine whether these university men, whether these modern historians, in their turn, more or less unconsciously, would not replace the priests and would not supplement God; my proposition is exactly the following, that the modern scientific methods, imported, transported as they are into the domain of history, demand, if one understands them exactly, and in all their extreme rigor, qualities which are not the qualities of man.

Our friend the historian Pierre Deloire was saying to me, — for I have no need to add that I have nothing against historians personally, and that the serious historians are the first to be moved by these grave contrarieties, — the historian Pierre Deloire said to me one day at the office of the cahiers: The good time of the historians is past. — He meant thus to mock, gently, the earlier historians. — The good time of the historians, he said, was when the professor of history, seated before his desk, redid at leisure all the operations of the world; he spoke of everything; he wrote about everything; he was minister, and redid the administration of Colbert, who, between us, was not very strong; he was general or admiral, and redid the battle of Actium; that Mark Antony, eh, what a brute; he redid the campaign plans; he was king, he redid Versailles, Paris and Saint-Denis; he was the king, in his study; he was the emperor, the first emperor; he redid Waterloo; that Napoleon, what an imbecile, as General Mirbeau recently said; ask for the memoirs of General Baron Mirbeau; when M. Mirbeau discovered that Napoleon was the worst of imbeciles, that great romantic rentier revolutionary was only following the lessons of his old professors of history; thus, continued the historian Pierre Deloire, thus the professor of history, being the king, the emperor, the general, held the whole world on his knees, and he could, in the chief-town of his arrondissement, despise the sub-prefect and the sub-lieutenants of artillery, who are only the subordinates of the emperor or of the generals; he thus paid himself for the ideas which the sub-prefect manifested upon the superiority of the administrative hierarchy, and the sub-lieutenants upon the superiority of the military hierarchy.

By such returns upon the earlier historians, our friend Pierre Deloire indeed thought to signify that the historians of today, of whom he is one, have become modest; and perhaps he is right; perhaps the historians, personally and as historians, have become modest; but I ask myself precisely whether all the old pride has not taken refuge in the method, enlarged, carried to the limit, to infinity; I ask whether it is not true that the modern scientific methods, transported in a heap into history and become the historical methods, demand of the historian faculties which surpass the faculties of man.

It is not I who invent this circuit, this eccentric mental circumnavigation; it is my author; it is all our authors; I refer to that La Fontaine and his fables, which had all the éclat, which received all the welcome, and which obtained all the success of a manifesto; the matter is to study La Fontaine and his fables; what if we were to begin by speaking of something else; and here is the preface:

“One can consider man as an animal of a superior species, which produces philosophies and poems much as silkworms make their cocoons,”…

Much as!

… “and as bees make their hives. Imagine that before the fables of La Fontaine you are before one of these hives. One may speak to you as a man of letters and say to you: ‘Admire how clever these little creatures are.’ One may speak to you as a moralist and say to you: ‘Profit by the example of these insects so industrious.’ One may finally speak to you as a naturalist and say to you: ‘We are going to dissect a bee, examine its wings, its mandibles, its honey reservoir, the whole interior economy of its organs, and mark the class to which it belongs. We shall then look at its organs in exercise; we shall try to discover by what fashion it gathers the pollen of flowers, how it elaborates it, by what interior operation it changes it into wax or honey. We shall observe next the procedures by which it builds, assembles, varies and fills its cells; and we shall try to indicate the chemical laws and the mathematical rules according to which the materials it employs are fabricated and balanced. We wish to know how, a garden and its bees being given, a hive is produced, what are all the steps of the intermediate operation, and what general forces act at each of the steps of the operation. You will draw from this, if it pleases you, conclusions not only upon the bees and their hives, but upon all insects, and perhaps also upon all animals.’”

I do not insist today on what this program today appears to us to present of the ambitious, of the presumptuous, of the not very scientific even; some day we shall ask ourselves whether it is permitted thus to assimilate the historical sciences to the natural sciences, to refer them thus to the more abstract sciences, chemical, physical, mathematical; today I only wish to examine the very form of the knowing, the course, the tracing, this beginning the most foreign, the most distant, this approach, this detour, this longest, this most eccentric, this most circumferential circuit, and from the program I pass to the book itself, to the glorious book, to the example book, to the type book; one shall see therein, first part, the artist, chapter first, the Gallic spirit, that it is very deliberately that the author takes the longest road; the approach the longest, the word is not mine, but his:

“I should like, in order to speak of La Fontaine, to do as he did when he went to the Academy, ‘take the longest way.’ That road has always pleased him better than the others. Willingly he would cite Plato and would go back to the deluge to explain the deeds and gestures of a weasel, and, if one judges by the outcome,”…

He has not well seen all the malice of the good fellow going back on purpose to the sources, to the citations, to the bizarrely distant causes; he has not well seen all that there is of comic Molière in La Fontaine, and that false or amusing erudition, which is only an amused parody of pedantic erudition; he enrolls his author rather quickly among the modern historians.

… “if one judges by the outcome, many people find that he was not wrong. Let us, like him, take the schoolboys’ and the philosophers’ road, reason in his regard as he did in regard to his beasts, allege history and the rest. It is the longest if you wish: at the same time, it is perhaps the shortest.

“I.

“Here I am then at ease, free to seek out all the causes which may have formed my personage and his poetry;”…

All the causes which may have formed his personage and his poetry, what prodigious metaphysical audacity are the modest species of a literary program; but for today let us pass on.

… “free to travel and to relate my travel. I made one last year by the sea and the Rhine, to come back by Champagne.”…

To come back is admirable, in its learned naivety. One had to begin by going there.

… “Everywhere, in this circuit, the grandeur or the force bursts forth. In the north,”…

Circuit, the word is not mine, the word is Taine’s: this method is properly the method of the great belt-line; if you want to know Paris, begin by going round; circulate from Chartres to Montargis, and back; it is the method of concentric vibrations, beginning with the most circumferential vibration, the farthest from the center, the most foreign; admitting that one could ever obtain, for a beginning, this most circumferential vibration; for one sees well how vibrations start from a center, known; one does not see how to obtain the most circumferential vibration, nor even how to represent it to oneself, if the center is by definition unknown, and if a circle cannot be conceived without a known center; petition of principle; it is the contrary of what happens for sound, electric, optical waves, for all waves which move starting from their point of emission; it is the contrary of what happens when one throws a stone into the water; it is a spiral begun at the end the farthest from the center; on condition that one hold that end; it is the vast plane wheelings of the eagle, minus the acuity of gaze, and the plumbing strike, and, at the center, the seizure; I cut up here my copy, and I cite at length, so that one may see, so that one may measure, on this eminent example, all the length of the circuit: “In the north, the Ocean beats the whitish cliffs or drowns the flat lands; the blows of this monotonous ram which obstinately strikes the strand, the heaping of these sterile waters which besiege the mouths of the rivers, the joy of the indomitable waves which dash against each other madly upon the limitless plain, send down to the bottom of the heart tragic emotions; the sea is a disproportionate and savage host whose neighborhood always leaves in man a fund of uneasiness and oppression. — Advancing toward the east, you meet fat Flanders, antique nurse of corporeal life, its immense plains all overflowing with a coarse abundance, its meadows peopled with lying herds which ruminate, its broad rivers which wind peaceably at full banks beneath the laden boats, its blackish clouds spotted with brilliant whitenesses which incessantly beat down their showers upon the greenery, its changing sky, full of violent contrasts, and which spreads a poetic beauty upon its heavy fecundity. — On leaving this great kitchen-garden, the Rhine appears, and one goes back toward France. The magnificent river deploys the cortège of its blue waters between two ranks of mountains as noble as itself; their summits stretch out by stages to the end of the horizon whose luminous belt receives them and links them; the sun lays a serene splendor upon their old slashed flanks, upon their dome of ever-living forests; in the evening, these great images float in undulations of gold and purple, and the river couched in the mist resembles a happy and pacific king who, before sleeping, gathers around him the gilded folds of his mantle. On both sides the slopes which feed it rise up with an energetic or austere aspect; the pines cover the summits with their silent draperies, and descend in bands to the bottom of the gorges; the powerful upward thrust which raises them, their stiff attitude gives the idea of a phalanx of young barbarian heroes, motionless and standing in their solitude which cultivation has never violated. They disappear with the red rocks of the Vosges. You leave the half-German country which has been ours only for a century. A new air less cold blows on your cheeks; the sky changes and the soil too. You have entered into the true France, the one which has conquered and shaped the rest. It seems that from all sides sensations and ideas flow in to explain to you what the Frenchman is.

“I came back by this road at the beginning of autumn, and I recall how the change of landscape struck me. No more grandeur nor power; the wild or sad air fades; monotony and poetry go; variety and gaiety begin. Not too many plains nor mountains; not too much sun nor humidity. No excess and no energy. Everything there seemed handy and civilized; everything there was on a small model, in convenient proportions, with an air of fineness and of agreeableness. The mountains had become hills, the woods were hardly more than copses, the undulations of the terrain received, without discontinuance, the cultivations. Thin rivers wound between groves of alders with gracious smiles. A line of solitary poplars at the end of a grayish field, a frail birch that trembles in a clearing of broom, the passing flash of a brook across the duckweeds that obstruct it, the delicate tint with which distance clothes some retired wood, those are the beauties of our landscape; it appears flat to eyes that have rested upon the noble architecture of southern mountains, or that have been nourished with the superabundant greenery and heroic vegetation of the north; the great lines, the strong colors are wanting there; but the sinuous contours, the light nuances, all the fleeting graces come to amuse the agile spirit that contemplates them, to touch it sometimes, without exalting it or overwhelming it. — If you go further into the true Champagne, these sources of poetry grow poorer and finer still. The vine, sad humpbacked plant, twists its feet among the pebbles. The chalky plains beneath their meager harvests stretch out variegated and dull like the cloak of a carter. Here and there a line of trees marks across the countryside the trail of a whitish brook. One loves nevertheless the pretty sun that shines softly between the elms, the thyme that perfumes the dry slopes, the bees that buzz above the buckwheat in flower: light beauties which only a sober and fine race can savor. Add that the climate is not such as to harden it and to impassion it. It has neither excesses nor contrasts; the sun is not terrible as in the south, nor the snow durable as in the north. At the height of June, the clouds pass in troops, and, often as early as February, the mist envelops the trees with its bluish gauze without clinging in frost around their branches. One can go out in any season, live outside without too much suffering; the extreme impressions do not come to blunt the senses or to concentrate sensibility; man is not weighed down nor exalted; to feel, he has no need of violent shocks and he is not apt for great emotions. Everything is middling here, tempered, turned rather toward delicacy than toward strength. Nature which is clement is not prodigal; she does not stuff her nurslings with a brutal abundance; they eat soberly, and their food is not heavy. The soil, a little dry and stony, gives them scarcely more than bread and wine; and even this wine is light, so light that the people of the North, to take pleasure in it, charge it with brandy. These will not go, after their example, fill themselves with meats and burning drinks to flood their veins by a sudden influx of coarse blood, to carry into their brain stupor or violence; one sees them at the door of their cottage, eating standing a little bread and their soup; their wine puts into their heads only liveliness and good humor.

“The more one looks at them, the more one finds that their gestures, the forms of their faces announce a race apart. A month ago, in Flanders, especially in Holland, there were only great features badly arranged, bony, too prominent; as one advanced toward the marshes, the body became more lymphatic, the complexion paler, the eye more glassy, more engorged in the pallid flesh. In Germany, I discovered in their gazes an expression of vague melancholy or of inert resignation; other times, the blue eye kept even into old age its virginal limpidity; and the rosy cheek of the young men, the valiant springing of the superb bodies announced the integrity and the vigor of the primitive sap. Here, and for fifty leagues around Paris, beauty is wanting, but the intelligence shines, not the petulant verve and chattering gaiety of the southerners, but the nimble, just, shrewd, malicious spirit, prompt to irony, which finds its amusement in the misadventures of others. These townsfolk, on the step of their door, wink behind your back; these apprentices behind the workbench point out to one another your ridiculousness and go to gloss. One never enters here into a workshop without uneasiness; were you a prince and embroidered with gold, these urchins in dirty sleeves will have weighed you up in a minute, big gentleman that you are, and it is almost certain that you will serve them as a puppet at the evening’s end.

“These are reasonings of a traveler, such as one makes wandering at adventure in unknown streets or turning in the evening in one’s inn-room. These truths are literary, that is to say vague; but we have no others at present in this matter, and one must content oneself with these, such as they are, while awaiting the figures of statistics, and the precision of experiences. There is not yet a science of races, and one risks much when one tries to figure out how soil and climate can shape them. They shape them nevertheless and the differences of the European peoples, all sprung from the same stock, prove it sufficiently. Air and food make the body in the long run; the climate, its degree and its contrasts produce the habitual sensations, and finally the definitive sensibility: that is the whole man, spirit and body, in such fashion that the whole man takes and keeps the imprint of soil and sky; one perceives it by looking at the other animals, which change at the same time as he, and by the same causes; a Dutch horse is as little like a horse of Provence as a man of Amsterdam to a man of Marseille. I even believe that man, having more faculties, receives deeper impressions; the outside enters into him more, because the doors with him are more numerous. Imagine the peasant who lives the whole day in the open air, who is not, like us, separated from nature by the artifice of protective inventions and by the preoccupation of ideas or visits. The sky and the landscape take with him the place of conversation; he has no other poems; it is not the readings and conversations that fill his mind, but the forms and colors that surround him; he dreams of them, his hand resting on the handle of the plow; he feels their serenity or sadness when at evening he comes back seated on his horse, his legs hanging, and his eyes follow without reflection the red bands of the setting sun. He does not reason about them, he does not arrive at clear judgments; but all these dull emotions, similar to the innumerable and imperceptible rustlings of the countryside, assemble to make this habitual tone of the soul which we call the character. It is thus that the spirit reproduces nature; the objects and poetry of without become the images and poetry of within. One must not hazard too much in conjectures, but in the end it is because there is a France, it seems to me, that there has been a La Fontaine and Frenchmen.”

My God yes; only there is a France for everyone, France shines for everyone, and all the Frenchmen, if they shall always be French, are not La Fontaine; I do not insist upon all these difficulties, upon all these contrarieties; I hold today to the very form of the knowing; the method does not reveal itself in all modern works everywhere with so high an audacity; it does not form in all modern works everywhere the object of so manifest a declaration as in this eminent La Fontaine; it is elsewhere more or less dissimulated, more or less implicit; but it is essentially, eminently, the modern historical method, obtained by the transfer, by the direct transfer, in a block, of modern scientific methods into the domain of history; the author, like a good companion, begins by making his tour of France; he would make his tour of the world, if he were a better companion; and when he has finished his tour of the country, he begins the other tour, in order not to fall by inadvertence into the heart of his subject, he begins the tour dearest to every well-born historian, the tour of books and libraries; with this tour shall begin paragraph two.

“In any case, there is a means of making sure of this character that we attribute to the race. The first library will show you whether it is indeed primitive and natural. It suffices to listen to what the people says, at the moment when its tongue is unloosed, when reflection or imitation have not yet altered the original accent. And do you know what this people says? what La Fontaine, without suspecting it, will say again later.”…

Without suspecting it is worth a certain price. “What an opposition between our twelfth-century literature and that of the neighboring nations.”

I stop here for today the citation; the method is indeed what we have said; it is doubly what we have said; when by misfortune the historian at last reaches the frontiers of his subject, barely escaped from the indefiniteness, from the infinity of the previous circuit, he hastens, to parry this stroke of fate, to throw himself into another indefiniteness, into another infinity, that of the subject itself; barely escaped from having absorbed a first indefiniteness, a first infinity, that of the circuit, that of the course, and of all those works of approach, which had as principal object not to approach, he invents, he imagines, he finds, he feigns a new indefiniteness, a new infinity, that of the subject itself; he analyzes, he cuts up his very subject into as many slices, into as many parcels as can be done; there will be cuts, longitudinal slices, lateral slices, vertical slices, horizontal slices, oblique slices; there would be more; but our space unfortunately has only three dimensions; and as our images of literature are traced upon our figures of geometry, the number of combinations is rather restricted; restricted though it be, we obtain already rather fine results; we shall study separately the man, the artist, the thinker, the dreamer, the geometer, the writer, the stylist, and I omit some, in the same person, in the same author; that will make as many chapters; above all we shall take care not to occupy ourselves in the same chapter with the art and the artist; that would make a chapter lost; and if by adventure, by mishap we manage to traverse all the indefinitenesses, all the infinities of detail of all these chapters, of all these sections, there remains to us a supreme resource, a last means of catching up; having studied separately the man, the writer, the artist, and so on, we shall study the relations of the man and the writer, then of the artist and of art, and of the stylist, and so on, first two by two, then three by three, and so on; a certain number of sections being given, forming units, the same mathematics brings us the formulas, and we know how many combinations of relation can be established; that will make so many new chapters; and when we shall have finished, if ever we finish, the devil take the good fellow if he can even gather up his pieces; for to reassemble them, he must not even think of it; the author has made a game of patience in which no patience could be regained.

The good fellow had foreseen all that; he had foreseen many other things; he had, let us believe, by name foreseen Taine; he knew that a bundle is more and other than the arithmetical sum of the darts; he knew that man is more and other than the arithmetical sum of the sections, that a book is more and other than the arithmetical sum of the chapters; to separate the elements of the bundle is the best, is the only means to break it; but in history it is not a matter of breaking reality, of shattering one’s author, of fracturing one’s text; one must render them, hear them, interpret them, represent them; one will permit me to cite from a non-scholarly edition:

An old man near to going where death was calling him,
My dear children, said he, (to his sons he was speaking),
See whether you will break these darts bound together.

I shall explain to you the knot that joins them.
The eldest having taken them, and made all his efforts,
Returned them, saying: I give it to the stronger.
A second succeeds him, and sets himself in posture,
But in vain. A youngest also tries the adventure.
All lost their time; the bundle resisted:
Of these darts joined together not one was split.
Feeble folk, said the father, I must show you
What my strength can do in a like encounter.
They thought he was joking; they smiled, but wrongly:
He separates the darts, and breaks them without effort.

Our moderns break without effort the realities they study; it remains to know whether historical realities accommodate themselves to this treatment.

A historian must conserve, on the contrary; he is essentially a conservator of the past universe; how to conserve, if one breaks.

Such is not the caricature and counterfeit of modern historical methods, but their very mode, their schema, the back-thought of those who introduced them before us, of those who practice them among us; attend a defense of a historical thesis; most of the reproaches that the jury addresses to the candidate come back to this: that the candidate has not exhausted all the indefiniteness, all the infinity of detail; I do not say that the members of the jury exhaust it in their own works; but what I do say, if you attend a thesis defense and listen well, if you interpret the criticisms of the jury, is that they come back generally to that; one must have exhausted the infinity of detail to arrive at the subject; and within the subject itself one must, by multipartition, have exhausted an infinity of infinity of detail; the manner in which one treats the subject, when one has arrived at the subject, comes back in effect to treating it itself as a road, as a course, as a place of passage indefinitely detailed, as a circuit in itself, to acting in the end as if it were not the subject, to making it that it not be the subject.

Before beginning, an infinity of detail by circulation; at the moment of beginning, an infinity of infinity of detail by multipartition.

To exhaust the indefiniteness, the infinity of detail in the knowledge of all the real, that is the high, that is the divine, that is the mad ambition, and whether one wills it or not it is the infinite weakness of a method which I am indeed obliged to name by its scholastic name the discursive method; having no occasion, moreover, to present myself any time soon before the State jury constituted to maintain in the agrégation of philosophy the original purity of the bygone doctrines, I can treat of intuitive and discursive methods, and confront them, without incurring, as recently happened to a young man, the universitarian thunderbolts; of discursive certitude and of intuitive certitude; the intuitive method passes in general for superhuman, prideful, mysterious, agnosticist; and one believes that the discursive method is human, modest, clear and distinct, scientific; I shall demonstrate on the contrary, one day when we shall try to test our methods more deeply, that in history it is the discursive method which is superhuman, prideful, mysterious, agnosticist; and that it is the intuitive method which is human, modest, clear and distinct as much as we can, scientific.

To exhaust the immensity, the indefiniteness, the infinity of detail in order to obtain the knowledge of all the real, such is the superhuman ambition of the discursive method; to start from the farthest possible point, to journey by the longest possible series; to arrive as late as possible; barely arrived, to set out again upon the longest possible interior voyage: but if from the farthest possible departure to the most retarded possible arrival and in this very arrival an indefinite, infinite series of detail interposes itself immense, how to exhaust this detail; a God alone would suffice for it; and in the same time that the professors of history and the historians renounced becoming kings and emperors, and congratulated themselves upon it, they did not perceive that in the same time this same new method, this scientific method, this modern historical method demanded that they should become Gods.

Such is indeed the unheard-of ambition of the modern world; an ambition not yet tested; the savant chasing God away from everywhere, inconsiderately, blindly, both from science, where indeed perhaps he has nothing to do, and from metaphysics, where perhaps one could find some occupation for him; God chased from history; and by a singular irony, by a new return, God finding himself again in the savant historian, God not chased from the savant historian; that is to say, literally, the historian having conceived his science according to a method which requires of him exactly the qualities of a God.

Such indeed is the back-thought of all those who founded modern historical science, who introduced modern historical methods, that is to say of all those who transported in a block into the domain of history the scientific methods borrowed from the sciences which are not sciences of history: a humanity wholly mistress of all its history; a humanity having exhausted all the detail of all its history, having therefore traversed a whole indefiniteness, a whole infinity of indefinite, infinite roads, having therefore literally exhausted a whole indefinite, infinite universe of detail; a humanity God, having acquired, encompassed all knowledge in the universe of its total memory.

A humanity become God by the total infinity of its knowledge, by the infinite amplitude of its total memory, this idea is everywhere in Renan; it was truly the viaticum, the consolation, the hope, the secret ardor, the interior fire, the secular eucharist of a whole generation, of a whole crop of historians, of the generation which in the domain of history was precisely inaugurating the modern world; hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea; it is everywhere in l’Avenir de la science, — pensées de 1848; — and what a halt imagined for humanity at last informed, learned, saturated with its memory, total; what a halt of beatitude; what a halt of beatitude and truly of divinity; what a singular paragraph of assurance and of limitation I find in the very preface, written at the last moment to present to the public, in the age of old age, a work of youth:

“The historical sciences and their auxiliaries, the philological sciences, have made immense conquests since I embraced them with so much love, forty years ago. But one sees the end of them. In a century, humanity will know more or less what it can know about its past; and then it will be time to stop; for the property of these studies is, as soon as they have attained their relative perfection, to begin to demolish themselves. The history of religions is cleared up in its most important branches. It has become clear, not by reasons a priori, but by the very discussion of the alleged testimonies, that there has never been, in the centuries within reach of man, any revelation nor supernatural fact. The processus of civilization is recognized in its general laws. The inequality of races is established. The titles of each human family to more or less honorable mentions in the history of progress are more or less determined.”

I copy this citation, in order not to cut up my copy; we are appalled, today, by this assurance, and by this limitation; what expressions of audacity and of theocratic limitation: one sees the end of the historical sciences; in a century, humanity will know more or less what it can know about its past; and then it will be time to stop;… the history of religions is cleared up in its most important branches;… the processus of civilization is recognized in its general laws; the inequality of races is established; the titles of each human family to more or less honorable mentions in the history of progress are more or less determined. And this singular and disquieting affirmation, this implacable, haughty, disabused judgment: the property of these studies is, as soon as they have attained their relative perfection, to begin to demolish themselves.

What contemporary historian, what grandson, what great-nephew of the old man will not draw back in seizure before such affirmations, before such presumptions, before this admirable and tranquil pride, before these certitudes and these limitations; a humanity God, so perfectly filled with its total memory that it has nothing more to know henceforth; a humanity God, halted as a God in the contemplation of its total knowledge, having so completely, so perfectly exhausted the detail of the real that it has arrived at the end, and there it holds itself; who at need, among the historians of the present time, shall disavow the ambitions of the ancestor and shall not treat them as chimeras and feigned imaginings; who shall not renounce them, for we do not always have the courage to avow our ancestors, to declare our origins, and from whom we are born, and whence we descend; the young people of today do not always recognize the great ancestors; it is not the fathers who do not recognize their sons, but the sons who do not recognize their fathers; and as our bourgeois politicians do not willingly recognize their great ancestors of the French Revolution, so our modest historians do not always recognize their great ancestors of the modern mental revolution, the innovators of the historical methods, the creators of the modern intellectual world; and then, since the time of the great old men, we have received rude warnings; for two reasons, the one covering the other, none today would advance that the whole history of the world is on the point of completion, none today, among all the historians, would subscribe to the venturesome anticipations, to the full great ambitions of Renan.

First, for reasons of history itself; it has happened, on a very great scale, for history, what generally happens with French naval constructions; one does not see the end of them: when history was put on the ways, armed, or, to say the word, equipped with the modern methods, the innovators drew up the estimate; but as one advanced, and precisely having started from the antique times one was moving toward modern times, the miscalculations multiplied; they have multiplied so well that today none would dare to prognosticate their end, nor to announce the end of the work; the only historian of the French Revolution that I know personally who is exactly serious will tell us as much as we will that to bring to a good end only the history of the French Revolution would require thousands of lives of veritable historians; now one does not see that thousands of them are being born; and we are far from the account.

Second, and this second reason, being a reason of reality, covers and commands the first, which was a reason of knowledge; how would history halt, if humanity does not halt; unless one suppose that history should not be the history of humanity; and that is indeed where one had arrived, that is indeed what one supposed, at least implicitly; one has so much spoken of history, of history alone, of history in general, of history in itself, of history quite simply, one has so much elevated history that one has somewhat forgotten that this word all alone says nothing, that it needs a complement of determination, that history is nothing if it is not the history of some event, that history in general is nothing if it is not the history of the world and of humanity. If therefore, and that was the first cause for which none today would any more advance that history is on the point of completing itself and closing itself, if therefore the history of acquired humanity is far from being acquired itself, how would the history of a humanity which is not acquired itself be acquired; and when the history of the past is not near to being achieved, far from it, how would the history of the future be near to closing itself; we touch here upon the very secret of this modern weakness; one knows today, one has recognized, generally, that most of the ideas and theses claimed positive or positivist cover ideas and theses metaphysical badly dissimulated; this idea of Renan, that we consider briefly today, which seems an idea historical modest purely, and simply, this idea that history is approaching its completion and its closing, implies at bottom an idea highly and prideful metaphysical, extremely affirmed, bearing upon humanity itself; it implies this idea that modern humanity is the last humanity, that one has never done anything better, in the kind, that one will never do anything better, that it is useless to insist, that the modern world is the last of worlds, that man and that nature has said its last word.

Incredible learned naivety, childish pride of the learned and the warned; humanity has almost always believed that it had just precisely said its last word; humanity has always thought that it was the last and the best humanity, that it had attained its form, that it would soon have to close, and to think of the rest of beatitude; what is interesting, what is new, is not a humanity after so many others, it is not that modern humanity should have believed, in its turn, that it was the best and the last humanity; what is interesting, what is new, is that modern humanity believed itself well guarded against such weaknesses by its science, by the immense heaping up of its knowledges, by the surety of its methods; never did one see so well that science does not make philosophy, and life, and conscience; armed, warned, guarded though the modern world was, it is precisely into the oldest human error that it has fallen, as by chance, and into the most common; the propositions most learnedly formulated come back to the same as the ancient first stammerings; and just as the greatest savants of the world, if they are not strutters, before love and before death remain stupid and disarmed as the lowest of the wretched, so mother humanity, become the most learned in the world, has found herself again stupid and disarmed before the oldest error in the world; as in the time of the most ancient gods she has measured the forms of civilization attained, and she has estimated that it was not going too badly, that she was, that she would be the last and the best humanity, that everything was going to congeal in the eternal beatitude of a humanity God.

If I wished to seek in l’Avenir de la science all this pride, all this assurance and this naive certitude, I should have to cite all of l’Avenir de la science, and so enormous a citation would attract to me again unpleasantness with the house of Calmann Lévy; this book is nothing if it is not the whole heavy and full gospel of this new faith, of this faith the last in date, and provisionally the definitive one; all this admirable, and truly prodigious book, all this book of youth and of force is in its luxuriant fullness as if swollen with this religious faith; one will permit me not to cite a word of it, in order not to cite the whole; we shall find this book again besides, this Buddhic book, this immense book, almost formless; for I have always said, and I have perhaps written that the day when one shall seriously want to study the modern world it is l’Avenir de la science that one shall have to attack first and above all; the old pourana of the author, written the day after the agrégation of philosophy, as it was then, passed in September, written in the last two months of 1848 and in the first four or five months of 1849, the great volume, harsh, dogmatic, sectarian and hard, the enormous literary parcel, the big book, with its heaviness and its mediocrely literary bearing, the baggage, the big volume, the old manuscript, the first construction, the old pages, the essay of youth, of naive, often abrupt, bushy form, full of innumerable incorrectnesses, the old work, with its notes in a heap, the wall with its essential stones, remains for me the capital work of Renan, and the one which truly gives us the basis and the origin of his thought entire, if it is true that a great life unhappily is almost always only a persevering maturity realized, abruptly revealed in a lightning flash of youth; Renan himself lived from it much more, again much more than he has said in his preface; and the old Pourana of the author is truly also the old Pourana of the modern world; how many moderns, saying it, not saying it, have lived from it even today, unconsciously or not, all of us live from it, sectarians and libertarians, and, as Hugo says, mystical and carnal.

I therefore have indeed the right, I have the duty to seek in Renan and in Taine the first thought of the modern world, the thought behind the head, as one says, which is always the deep thought, the interesting thought, the interior and moving thought, the acting thought, the cause-thought, the source and the resource of thought, the true thought; and to find the back-thought of Renan, passing to the other end of his full career, one knows it is in the dialogues and the philosophical fragments, in the dramas that one must seek it; I refer to the Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, by Ernest Renan, of the French Academy, fourth edition; I know well that the citation that I am about to make is borrowed from the third part, which is that of the dreams; certitudes, probabilities, dreams; I know that my personage is that of Theoctistes, the one who founds God, if I have good memory; I know that the objections are presented to him by Eudoxus, who must have good opinion; I do not forget all the precautions that Renan takes in his preface; but in the end my personage says, and I copy at full length; I pass over the passages where this Theoctistes dreams of intellectual Terror; we shall return to them some day; for they are extremely important, and grave; and I hold to those where he dreams of intellectual Deification:

“I have told you that the order of ideas in which I keep myself at this moment relates only imperfectly to the planet Earth, and that one must understand such speculations as aiming beyond humanity. Doubtless the knowing and thinking subject will always be limited; but knowledge and power are unlimited, and by counter-stroke thinking nature itself can be greatly enlarged, without going out of the known circle of biology. A wide application of the discoveries of physiology and of the principle of selection could bring about the creation of a superior race, having its right to govern, not only in its science, but in the very superiority of its blood, of its brain and of its nerves. These would be species of gods or devas, beings tenfold in worth what we are, who could be viable in artificial milieus. Nature makes nothing that is not viable in the general conditions; but science will be able to extend the limits of viability. Nature so far has done what she could; the spontaneous forces will not go beyond the low-water mark they have reached. It is for science to take up the work at the point where nature has left it. Botany makes vegetable products live artificially which would disappear if the hand of man did not unceasingly sustain them. An age can be conceived in which the production of a deva would be evaluated at a certain capital, representing the costly apparatuses, the slow actions, the laborious selections, the complicated education and the painful conservation of such a being against nature. A factory of Ases, an Asgaard, could be reconstituted in the center of Asia, and, if one is repugnant to these sorts of myths, let one kindly notice the procedure that ants and bees employ to determine the function to which each individual ought to be applied; let one reflect above all on the means that botanists employ to create their singularities. It is always nutrition or rather the development of one organ by the atrophy of another which forms the secret of these anomalies. Recall that Vedic doctor whose name, according to Burnouf, signified οὖ τὸ σπέρμα εἰς τὴν ϰεφάλην ἀνέϐη. As the double flower is obtained by the hypertrophy or the transformation of the organs of generation, as flowering and fructification exhaust the vitality of the being that accomplishes these functions, so it is possible that the means of concentrating all the nervous force in the brain, of transforming it all into brain, if one may so say, by atrophying the other pole, may one day be found. One of these functions is a weakening of the other; what is given to the one is taken from the other. It goes without saying that we are not speaking of those shameful suppressions which only make incomplete beings. We speak of an intimate transfusion, thanks to which the forces which nature has directed toward different operations would be employed for a single end.”

These dreams, these imaginings appear to us today monstrous, perhaps because they are indeed monstrous, above all because the natural sciences have since continued to march on, and because from all sides we have received from reality rude warnings; none today, among all the modern historians, and among all the savants, would endorse them; and not only is there none today who does not renounce them, but there is none at bottom who does not bear a grudge against the old man for having so shamefully shown his back-thought; we on the contrary, who have no professional honor engaged in this debate, thank Renan for having, at the end of his full career, at the age when man makes up his accounts and his till and the balance-sheet of his life and the liquidation of his thought, finished enlightening us upon the distant backgrounds of his dreams; through him, in him we can grasp at last the whole orientation of modern thought, its secret desire, its occult dream.

“One imagines therefore (no doubt outside our planet) the possibility of beings beside which man would be almost as little a thing as the animal is relatively to man; an epoch in which science would replace the existing animals by higher mechanisms, as we see that chemistry has replaced whole series of bodies of nature by series much more perfect. Just as humanity has come out of animality, so divinity would come out of humanity. There would be beings that would make use of man as man makes use of animals.”

It is then perhaps that man would perceive that man makes ill use of animals.

“Man scarcely stops at this thought that a step, a movement of his crushes myriads of animalcules. But, I repeat, intellectual superiority entails religious superiority; these future masters, we must dream them as incarnations of the good and of the true; there would be joy in subordinating oneself to them.”

I stop here my citation, because it is very long to copy, and because here, as in l’Avenir de la science, one would have to cite everything, so full is everything; curious, disquieting, novel, impassioning; yet I must start again:

“The universe would thus be consummated in a single organized being, in the infinity of which would be summed up decillions of decillions of lives, past and present at once.”

Now it is evident that such a summing up could only be obtained by a totalization of universal memory, therefore by a globalization, by a completion, and by a halt of history.

“All living nature would produce a central life, a great hymn coming forth from billions of voices, as the animal results from billions of cells, the tree from millions of buds. A single consciousness would be made by all, and all would participate in it; the universe would be an infinite polyparium, where all beings that have ever been would be welded by their base, living at once their own life and the life of the ensemble.”

It is indeed the gathering of all human and superhuman memory into a consciousness God; now this gathering can be obtained by two means; if one believes in God, if one admits the resurrection of the dead, and the miracle, this gathering of all the memory of creatures can be obtained without passing through the intermediary of history; since it is the individual memories themselves which serve again; there is no need to relearn; but if, as is, I think, Renan’s position, we do not believe in God, if we do not admit the personal, individual resurrection of the dead, in a word if from our understanding we reject the miracle, there is no longer any means of obtaining this gathering of all memory without passing through the intermediary of history; the crowning and the halt of creation is obtained by the fabrication of a historian God; Renan would say: of a God historian; but for us, and for what we make of it, that comes back to the same; I even believe that in the formation of Renan’s thought, it is the historian who has raised himself up to God, who has culminated in God, who has made himself God, much rather than it is God who has incarnated himself in the historian.

“Already we participate in the life of the universe (life

But indeed I must resolve to cut up here my copy:

Already we participate in the life of the universe “(life very imperfect still) by morality, science and art. Religions are the abridged and popular forms of this participation; therein lies their sanctity. But nature aspires to a communion much more intense, communion which shall not attain its last term until there shall be an actually perfect being. Such a being does not yet exist, since we have only three ways of establishing the existence of a being, of seeing it, of hearing speak of it, of seeing its action, and since a being such as the one of which we speak is known by none of these three ways; but one conceives the possibility of a state where, in the infinity of space, all should live. Little matter is now organized, and what is organized is feebly organized; but one can admit an age where all matter should be organized, where thousands of suns agglutinated together would serve to form a single being, feeling, enjoying, absorbing through its burning gullet a river of voluptuousness that would spread out of itself in a torrent of life. This living universe would present the two poles that every nervous mass presents, the pole that thinks, the pole that enjoys. Now, the universe thinks and enjoys through millions of individuals. One day, a colossal mouth would savor the infinite; an ocean of intoxication would flow there; an inexhaustible emission of life, knowing neither rest nor fatigue, would spring up into eternity. To coagulate this divine mass, the Earth perhaps will have been taken and worked over like a clod that one kneads without care for the ant or the worm that hides therein. What would you? We do as much. Nature, at all degrees, has for sole care to obtain a superior result by the sacrifice of inferior individualities. Does a general, a head of State take account of the poor folk that he gets killed?

“A single being summing up all the enjoyment of the universe, the infinity of particular beings joyous to contribute to it, there is in that no contradiction except for our superficial individualism. The world is only a series of human sacrifices; one would soften them by joy and by resignation. The companions of Alexander lived by Alexander, enjoyed Alexander. There are social states where the people enjoy the pleasures of their nobles, take complacence in their princes, say: ‘our princes’, make of their glory their glory. The animals that serve for the nourishment of the man of genius or of the man of good ought to be content, if they knew to what they serve. Everything depends on the end, and, if one day vivisection on a large scale were necessary to discover the great secrets of living nature, I imagine beings, in the ecstasy of voluntary martyrdom, coming to offer themselves crowned with flowers. The useless killing of a fly is a blamable act; he who is sacrificed for ideal ends has not the right to complain, and his lot, in the regard of the infinite (τῷ θεῷ), is worthy of envy. So many others die without leaving a trace in the construction of the infinite tower! It is a monstrous thing, the sacrifice of a living being to the egoism of another; but the sacrifice of a living being to an end willed by nature is legitimate. Rigorously speaking, the man in whose life egoism reigns commits an act of cannibal in eating flesh; only the man who works in his measure for the good or the true possesses this right. The sacrifice then is made to the ideal, and the sacrificed being has its small place in the eternal work, which so many other beings have not. Beautiful antiquity rightly conceived the immolation of the animal destined to be eaten as a religious act. This killing done in view of an absolute necessity seemed to need to be dissimulated by garlands and a ceremony.

“The great number must think and enjoy by procuration. The idea of the Middle Ages, of people praying for those who do not have time to pray, is very true. The mass works; a few fulfill for it the high functions of life; behold humanity. The result of the obscure labor of a thousand peasants, serfs of an abbey, was a Gothic apse, in a beautiful valley, shaded by tall poplars, where pious persons came six or eight times a day to chant psalms to the Eternal. That constituted a rather fine way of adoring, especially when, among the ascetics, there was a Saint Bernard, a Rupert of Tuy, an Abbot Joachim. This valley, these waters, these trees, these rocks wished to cry out toward God, but had no voice; the abbey gave them one. Among the Greeks, a nobler race, that was done better by the flute and the games of the shepherds. One day that will be done better still, if a laboratory of chemistry or of physics replaces the abbey. But in our day the thousand peasants once serfs, now emancipated, perhaps give themselves over to a coarse banquet, without ideal result of any kind, with the lands of the said abbey. The tax laid on these lands alone purifies them a little, by making them serve a superior end.

“A few live for all. If one wants to change this order, no one will live. The Egyptian, subject of Chephren, who died building the pyramids, has lived more than the one who passed useless days under his palms. Behold the nobility of the people; it desires no other; one will never content it with egoism. It wishes, if it does not enjoy, that there be those who enjoy. It dies willingly for the glory of a chief, that is to say for something in which it has no direct profit. I speak of the true people, of the unconscious mass, given over to its racial instincts, to whom reflection has not yet taught that the greatest stupidity that one can commit is to get oneself killed for whatever it might be.

“Sometimes, I conceive God thus as the great interior feast of the universe, as the vast consciousness where all is reflected and resounds. Each class of society is a cog, an arm of the lever in this immense machine. That is why each has its virtues. We are all functions of the universe; duty consists in this, that each fulfill well his function. The virtues of the bourgeoisie ought not to be those of the nobility; what makes a perfect gentleman would be a defect in a bourgeois. The virtues of each are determined by the needs of nature; the State in which there are no social classes is anti-providential. It matters little that Saint Vincent de Paul should not have been a great spirit. Raphael would have gained nothing by being well regulated in his mores. The divine effort which is in everything is produced through the just, the savants, the artists. Each has his part. Goethe’s duty was to be egoistic for his work. The transcendent immortality of the artist is in its own way supreme morality, if it serves the accomplishment of the particular divine mission with which each is charged here below.

“For me, I taste the whole universe through this sort of general sentiment which makes us sad in a sad city, gay in a gay city. I enjoy thus the voluptuousness of the voluptuous, the debaucheries of the debauchee, the worldliness of the worldling, the sanctity of the virtuous man, the meditations of the savant, the austerity of the ascetic. By a sort of gentle sympathy, I figure to myself that I am their consciousness. The discoveries of the savant are my good; the triumphs of the ambitious are a feast for me. I should be sorry if anything were lacking in the world; for I have consciousness of all that it encloses. My only displeasure is that this century is so low that it no longer knows how to enjoy. Then I take refuge in the past, in the sixteenth century, the seventeenth, in antiquity; all that has been beautiful, lovable, just, noble is for me a kind of paradise. With that I defy misfortune to reach me; I carry with me the charming garden of the variety of my thoughts.

philalèthe.

“You have tried to show under what forms one can dream of a consciousness of the universe more advanced than that whose manifestation is humanity. I am told that you possess even a side-trick to render conceivable the immortality of individuals.”

We cannot leave, even for today, this immortality of individuals; for this dogma of individual immortality forms the critical point of almost all doctrines; that is where the critic awaits the metaphysician; for that is where the backgrounds of hope reveal themselves; particularly here the dogma of individual immortality shall form the critical point of the doctrine; it is in this dogma indeed that we shall recognize how, in the dreams of this Theoctistes, the humanity or the superhumanity God obtains its total memory; we see therein from the first words that it does not obtain it by a real resurrection of real individuals, that it does not obtain it properly by what we all name the resurrection of the dead, but that the superhumanity God, in the dreams of this Theoctistes, obtains the totalization of its memory by a historical reconstitution, by a totalization of history, by the resurrection of the historians, by the reign and by the eternity of the Historian.

théoctiste.

“Say rather, the resurrection of individuals. On this point, I depart from the conceptions, marvelous indeed in poetry and ideal, to which the Greek genius rose. Plato does not seem to me admissible when he maintains that death is a good, the philosophical state par excellence. It is not true that the perfection of the soul, as is said in the Phaedo, is to be as detached as possible from the body. The soul without body is a chimera, since nothing has ever revealed to us such a mode of existing.

“Yes, I conceive the possibility of the resurrection, and I often say to myself like Job: Reposita est hæc spes in sinu meo. At the term of the successive evolutions, if the universe is ever brought back to a single absolute being, this being shall be the complete life of all; it shall renew in itself the life of the disappeared beings, or, if one prefers, in its bosom shall live again all those who have been. When God shall be at the same time perfect and all-powerful, that is to say when scientific omnipotence shall be concentrated in the hands of a good and upright being, this being shall will to resurrect the past, in order to repair its innumerable iniquities. God shall exist more and more; the more he shall exist, the more he shall be just. He shall be so fully on the day when whoever shall have worked for the divine work shall feel the divine work accomplished, and shall see the part he has had in it. Then the eternal inequality of beings shall be sealed for ever. He who has made no sacrifice to the good, to the true shall find on that day the exact equivalent of his stake, that is to say nothingness. One must not object that a recompense which shall arrive perhaps only in a billion centuries would be much weakened. A sleep of a billion centuries or a sleep of an hour, it is the same thing, and, if the recompense that I dream of be granted to us, it shall make on us the effect of succeeding instantaneously to the hour of death. Beatam resurrectionem exspectans, behold, for the idealist as for the Christian, the true formula that befits the tomb.

“A world without God is horrible. Ours appears such at the present hour; but it shall not always be thus. After the appalling entr’actes of ferocity and egoism of the growing being, perhaps shall be realized the dream of the deist religion, a supreme consciousness, rendering justice to the poor, avenging the virtuous man. ‘It ought to be; therefore it is,’ says the deist. We others, we say: ‘Therefore it shall be’; and this reasoning has its legitimacy, since we have seen that the dreams of moral consciousness can very well become realities one day. One conceives thus a consciousness which sums up all the others, even past ones, which embraces them inasmuch as they have worked for the good, for the absolute. In this pyramid of good, raised by the successive efforts of beings, each stone counts. The Egyptian of the time of Chephren of whom we were speaking a moment ago still exists by the stone he laid; thus shall it be of the man who shall have collaborated in the work of eternity. We live in proportion to the part we have taken in the edification of the ideal. The work of humanity is the good; those who shall have contributed to the triumph of the good fulgebunt sicut stellæ. Even if the Earth one day serves only as a stone for the construction of a future edifice, we shall be what the geological shell is in the block destined to build a temple. This poor trilobite whose trace is written in the thickness of our walls lives there still a little; it still makes a little part of our house.

eudoxe.

“Your immortality is only apparent; it does not go beyond the eternity of action; it does not imply the eternity of the person. Jesus today acts much more than when he was an obscure Galilean; but he no longer lives.

théoctiste.

“He lives still. His person subsists and is even augmented. Man lives where he acts. This life is dearer to us than the life of the body, since we willingly sacrifice the latter to the former. Note well that I do not speak only of life in opinion, of reputation, of memory. The latter indeed does not suffice; it has too many injustices. The best ones are those who flee it. Tamerlane is more celebrated than such a just man unknown. Marcus Aurelius has the reputation he deserves only because he was emperor and he wrote his thoughts. True influence is hidden influence; not that the definitive opinion of history is on the whole very false; but it sins altogether by proportion. Such a one unnamed has perhaps been greater than Alexander; such a woman’s heart that said not a word in her life felt better than the most harmonious poet. — I speak of life by influence, or, according to the expression of the mystics, of life in God. Human life, by its moral reverse, writes a little furrow, like the point of a compass, in the bosom of the infinite. This arc of a circle traced in God has no more end than God. It is in the memory of God that men are immortal. The opinion that absolute consciousness has of him, the remembrance it keeps of him, behold the true life of the just, and that life is eternal. Doubtless there is anthropomorphism in lending to God a consciousness like ours; but the use of anthropomorphic expressions in theology is inevitable; it has no more inconvenience than the employment of any other figure or metaphor. Language becomes impossible, if one pushes purism in this respect to excess.

eudoxe.

“Understood; but you have not explained to us how one can speak of real existence without consciousness.

théoctiste.

“Consciousness is perhaps a secondary form of existence. Such a word no longer has sense when one wishes to apply it to the whole, to the universe, to God. Consciousness supposes a limitation, an opposition of me and not-me, which is the very negation of the infinite. What is eternal is the idea. Matter is a thing wholly relative; it is not really what is; it is the color that serves to paint, the marble that serves to sculpt, the wool that serves to embroider. The possibility of making to exist anew what has already existed, of reproducing all that has had reality cannot be denied. Let us hasten to say it, every affirmation in such matter is an act of faith; now whoever says act of faith says an act surpassing experience (I do not say contradicting it). After all, is our hope presumptuous? Is our demand interested? No, no, certainly. We do not ask a recompense; we ask simply to be, to know more, to know the secret of the world, that we have sought so avidly, the future of humanity, which has so passionately moved us. That is permitted, I hope. Those who take existence as a duty, not as an enjoyment, have indeed right to that. For me, I do not precisely claim immortality, but I should like two things: first, not to have offered to nothingness and to the void the sacrifices that I may have made to the good and to the true; I do not ask to be paid for them; but I desire that this should serve some purpose: in the second place, the little I have done, I should be glad that someone knew it; I want the esteem of God, nothing more; this is not exorbitant, is it? Is one to reproach the dying soldier for being interested in the winning of the battle and for desiring to know whether his chief is content with him?

“Sensation ceases with the organ that produces it, the effect disappears with the cause. The brain decomposing, no consciousness in the ordinary sense of the word can persist. But the life of man in the whole, the place he holds there, his part in the general consciousness, behold what has no link with an organism, behold what is eternal. Consciousness has a relation with space, not that it resides at a point, but it feels in a determinate space. The idea has none; it is the pure immaterial; neither time nor death can do anything against it. The ideal alone is eternal; nothing remains but it and what serves it.

“Let us console ourselves, poor victims; a God is made with our tears.

euthyphron.

“The positivist savants will always have a capital difficulty against what you have just said, and also against several of the views that Philalèthe and Theophrastus have developed for us. You lend to the universe and to the ideal volitions, acts that one has so far remarked only in organized beings. Now nothing authorizes us to regard the universe as an organized being, even in the manner of the lowest zoophyte. Where are its nerves? Where is its brain? Now, without nerves or brain, or to say it better without organized matter, one has never so far observed consciousness or sentiment at any degree whatever.

théoctiste.

“Your objection, decisive against the existence of separated souls and of angels, is not decisive against the hypothesis of an intimate spring in the universe. This instinctive impulse would be something sui generis, a primary principle like motion itself. It is never except by metaphor that we have been able to present the universe as an animal. Animal supposes species, plurality of individuals; there would therefore be several universes! But that the infinite mass should produce a sort of general exudation, to which, for want of better and as a consequence of inevitable anthropomorphism, we give the name of consciousness, that is what the general facts of nature seem to indicate. Everything in nature is reduced to motion. Yes, certainly; but motion has a cause and an aim. The cause is the ideal; the aim, is consciousness.

philalèthe.

“I often say to myself that if the aim of the world were a race as breathless as you suppose toward science, there would be no flowers, no brilliant birds, no joy, no spring. All that supposes a God less busy than you believe, a God already arrived, who amuses himself and enjoys a state definitively acquired.

eudoxe.

I shall go further than you, and I shall claim at the center of the universe an immotum quid, a place of ideas, as Malebranche willed. One always comes back to the formulas of this great thinker, when one wishes to account for the relations of God and the universe, of the individual with the infinite. Believe me God is an absolute necessity. God shall be and God is. As reality, he shall be; as ideal, he is. Deus est simul in esse et in fieri. Only that can develop which is already. How, moreover, imagine a development having for starting-point nothingness? The initial abyss would have remained forever in repose, had not the Eternal Father fecundated it. Beside the fieri, one must therefore conserve the esse; beside the movement, the mover; at the center of the wheel, the motionless hub. Theoctistes has well shown us that only the monotheist hypothesis lends itself to the realization of our most deeply rooted ideas upon the necessity of a superior justice for man and humanity. Let us add that if movement has existed from all eternity, one does not conceive that the world should not have attained repose, uniformity and perfection. It is no easier to explain how the equilibrium has not yet been reestablished than to explain how the equilibrium was broken. If the shooter of whom we spoke yesterday has been shooting from eternity, he must already have hit the target.

euthyphron.

“We touch here upon the antinomies of Kant, upon those gulfs of the human spirit, where one is tossed from one contradiction to another. Arrived there, one must stop. Reason and language apply only to the finite. To transport them into the infinite is as if one claimed to measure the heat of the sun or of the center of the earth with an ordinary thermometer. The particular development of which we are witnesses is only the history of an atom; we want it to be the history of the absolute, and we apply to it the lines of a background situated at infinity. We confound the planes of the landscape; we commit the same error as that to which one is exposed in deciphering the papyri of Herculaneum. The different leaves penetrate one another reciprocally, and one refers to one page letters that come from ten pages further on.

eudoxe.

“Let us thank Theoctistes for having told us all his dreams. ‘It is just about thus that the priests speak; but the words are different.’ The superficial spirits alone escape the obsession of these problems. They shut themselves up in a cellar and deny the sky. Such people would have said to Columbus looking at the horizon of the sea toward the West: ‘Poor fool, you see well that there is nothing beyond.’

philalèthe.

“In a few years, if we exist and if anything exists, we may take up these questions again and see in what our manner of envisaging the universe shall have been modified. What a pity that we cannot, as in the legend told by Thomas of Cantimpré, give rendezvous to those of us who shall be dead, that they may come and render us account of the reality of the things of the other life!

eudoxe.

“I believe that in such matter the testimony of the dead is of little account. As the parable says: Neque si quis mortuorum resurrexerit credent. In matter of virtue, each finds the certitude by consulting his own heart.”

One will not pardon me so long a citation; but one will praise me for it; and one will doubtless put it to my account; for it is a pleasure always new to find these old full texts, perpetually disquieting with novelty; and when in a cahier one puts such important citations of Renan, one is always sure at least that there will be good morsels in the cahier; — I do not say that for Zangwill, who bears all comparison; — I know all the reproaches that one can make to the text that I have just cited; it is perpetually new; and it is old already; it is surpassed; phenomenon particularly interesting, it is above all surpassed precisely by the sciences on which Renan believed he found his most solid support, by the physical, chemical sciences, particularly by the natural sciences; — but here what should we say of Taine who made to the mathematical, physical, chemical, natural sciences an incessant reference; — it is precisely by the progress of the natural sciences that we are today led back to more human, and, the word says it, more natural conceptions; I am not unaware of all the precautions that one would have to take if one wished to grasp, comment and criticize all this text; but such is not today the task we have assigned ourselves; I know that there are in this enormous religious text whole pieces which today lift us up with indignation; and whole pieces which today appear to us extraordinarily weak; I know that there are in this enormous monument whole bodies of buildings that a word, a single word of Pascal, by simple confrontation, would annihilate; I know the proportions to be kept; I know how to measure a Pascal and a Renan; and I shall offend no one by saying that I do not confound with a great historian him who is the thinker himself; if I had to grasp and to comment and to criticize the text that we have reproduced, I know that one would have to begin by distinguishing in the text firstly Renan’s thought; secondly Renan’s back-thought; thirdly, and this is particularly regrettable to find, to observe, false windows, fragments, scarcely clothed, of a course of philosophy of secondary teaching, as secondary teaching of philosophy was in the time when Renan received it, pieces of courses, barely digested, upon Kant and the antinomies, upon the me and the not-me, so many other pieces which arrive unexpected to make the makeweight, to provide joinery, to plug a hole; how those flat reproductions of old university teachings, those pieces of competition, of the old competition, of the competition of that time, how those pedagogical reminiscences, suddenly arriving, and at the very moment when one expected them least, at the culminating point of the dialogue, are out of tune beside the veritable Renan, beside his own thought, and above all his back-thought; how they are inferior to the veritable text; and in the veritable text how the thought itself is inferior to the back-thought, or, if one will, how the back-thought is superior to the thought, to the thought of first encounter; what work it is to begin by discerning these three planes; but how one would be recompensed for it; how the part that remains is full and heavy; how the domination of the back-thought is imperious.

I am not unaware, I repeat, that most of these dreams stir in us legitimate indignations, and, to say everything, that there are sentences, in these texts, that would render you a democrat.

We are today less accommodating than this Eudoxus; but we are less tranquil, more uneasy, more impassioned than this Philalèthe; and it is precisely because we love the true that we are more impassioned; I have not wished to halt by reflections or by commentaries a text so exuberant, so full, so fervent; I well realize that a text so full overflows on all sides what we wish to ask of it today; that of itself it answers all sorts of immense questions that we do not wish to put to it today; and I am a little ashamed to retain so little of so vast a text; that is precisely what I was saying when I was saying that the whole modern world is in Renan; one cannot open Renan without there coming out of it an immensity of the modern world; and if the Pourana of youth was truly the Pourana of the youth of the modern world, the testament of old age is also the testament of all the old age of all the modern world; I well realize that having to treat all the other immense questions that the modern world has raised it is to the same text that we should have to mount again; and it is the same text that we should have to cite again, at full length; we should cite it, unwearied; we have cited it today, at full length, without interrupting it, and without troubling it with commentaries, because if it bears at the same time on an infinity of other immense questions, it bears also, entirely and fully, on the big question that has been raised before us; and on this question we have not interrupted it, because it is decisive, provided one hears it, and without even having to interpret it; it is formally a text of metaphysics, and I shall go so far as to say that it is a text of theology.

The texts of Taine, and on these texts let us refer to the same manifest example, are no less decisive, they do not less reveal the back-thought of the whole modern world; let us take up again that La Fontaine and his fables; all the theories of the end, which themselves so eminently characterize Taine, his methods, the modern methods, proceed exactly from the same spirit; we are today scandalized by their stiff and coarse assurance, manipulating without shame, and without success, the finest tissues, the most supple movements, the most living elaborations of genius itself; today I want to retain, of all this scandal, only the indications that seem to me indispensable for defining the very debate in which we shall find ourselves engaged.

Indispensable indications, in this sense that we shall retain only what we cannot rigorously do without; but indispensable indications also in this sense that they are capital and command all the rest; and it is for this that we cannot do without them.

For it is a capital advantage of Taine, and one that none of his enemies would think of contesting, that he is clean-cut; he does not mask his ambitions; he does not dissimulate his pretensions; brutal and hard, often coarse, and measuring the most subtle grandeurs by units which are not of the same order, he has at least the virtues of his vices, the advantages of his defects, the good qualities of his bad ones; and when he is mistaken, he is mistaken cleanly, like an honest man, without trickery, without falseness, without fluidity; he himself permits one to measure what we name his errors, and by his errors the errors of the modern world; and in the errors which, being the errors of all the modern world, are common to him with Renan, he permits us clean measures which Renan did not permit us; we owe to him the formula and the most striking example of the previous circuit; I cannot help considering the previous circuit, the voyage of the La Fontaine, as a magnificent example, as a magnificent symbol of all the modern historical method, a symbol in the only sense that we can give to that word, that is to say a part of reality; homogeneous and homothetic to an ensemble of reality, and representing suddenly, by an enlargement of art and of reality, all this immense ensemble of reality; I cannot help considering this magnificent circuit of the La Fontaine as a great example, as an eminent particular case, as a great honest symbol, so magnificently and so honestly composed that if someone other than Taine had wanted to do it on purpose, for the convenience of criticism and for the marveling of historians, he certainly would not by far have succeeded as well; I hold this tour of France to be a unique symbol; yes it is indeed the previous voyage that we all make, before all study, before all work, all of us the heirs, the holders, the small change of modern thought; all of us are always making it, that tour of France; and how many lives lost in making the tour of libraries; and similarly we owe to Taine, in this same La Fontaine, an eminent example of multipartition effected within the subject itself; and we are going to owe to him an eminent example of final accomplishment; for these theories which seize so brutally the bruised wings of poor genius come back, they too, they in the end, to supposing an exhaustion of the indefinite, infinite detail; they come back exactly to seizing, or to the pretension of seizing, in all the indefiniteness, in all the infinity of their detail, all the operations of genius itself; each of these theories, of learned, modest and scholarly appearance, in reality covers a metaphysical anticipation, a theological usurpation; the humblest of these theories supposes, humble in appearance, that the author has penetrated the secret of genius, that he knows how it is fabricated, that he himself could fabricate some, that he has penetrated the secret of nature and of man, that is to say, in the end, that having exhausted all the indefiniteness, all the infinity of the previous detail, in addition he has exhausted all the indefiniteness, all the infinity of the detail of creation itself; the humblest of these theories is nothing if it is not, in pretension, the seizure, by the historian, by the author, in full life, in full elaboration, of living genius; and in order to seize the genius, the seizure of a whole people, of a whole race, of a whole country, of a whole world.

If such is truly the reach obtained by the particular theories, what will not be the total reach obtained by the conclusion, where are gathered up and culminate all the ambitions of the particular theories; I cannot cite the particular theories; one would have to go back from the end of the volume to the beginning, one would have to cite almost the whole volume; I cite at length the conclusion; why do we feel only indifference when we cut up our copy of Taine, and why can we not cut up our copy of Renan without regret; it is not, as a historian of the economic realities would say, because the Renans cost seven francs fifty at the bookseller and because the Taines, at Hachette, cost only three francs fifty; and why, cutting up Renan, do we receive an impression of mutilation that we do not receive cutting up Taine; it is that, in spite of everything, a book of Taine is for us a volume, and that a book of Renan is for us more than a book; and why can one not copy Taine, and can one copy Renan, while being mistaken, it is true; and why is it a fine pleasure to correct on proofs a text of Renan, and does one make a duty of correcting on proofs a text of Taine; such is the difference that I see between the inheritances left by these two great masters of modern thought. “I have wished to show,” says Taine in the form of conclusion:

“I have wished to show the complete formation of a poetic work and to seek by an example in what consists the beautiful and how it is born.

“A race is found having received its character from the climate, the soil, the foods, and the great events that it has undergone at its origin. This character appropriates it and reduces it to the culture of a certain spirit as to the conception of a certain beauty. That is the national soil, very good for certain plants, but very bad for others, incapable of bringing to fruition the seeds of the neighboring country, but capable of giving its own an exquisite sap and a perfect flowering, when the course of centuries brings the temperature they need. Thus were born La Fontaine in France in the seventeenth century, Shakespeare in England during the Renaissance, Goethe in Germany in our day.

“For genius is nothing but a developed power, and no power can develop itself entirely, save in the country where it is found naturally and in everyone, where education nourishes it, where the public fortifies it, where the character sustains it, where the public provokes it. So the greater it is, the greater its causes; the height of the tree indicates the depth of the roots. The more perfect a poet is, the more national he is. The more he penetrates into his art, the more he has penetrated into the genius of his century and of his race. There needed the fineness, the sobriety, the gaiety, the Gallic malice, the elegance, the art and the education of the seventeenth century to produce a La Fontaine. There needed the interior view of characters, the precision, the energy, the English sadness, the impetuosity, the imagination, the paganism of the Renaissance to produce a Shakespeare. There needed the depth, the philosophy, the science, the universality, the criticism, the pantheism of Germany and of the nineteenth century to produce a Goethe. By this correspondence between the work, the country and the century, a great artist is a public man. It is by it that one can measure him and assign him his rank. It is by it that he pleases more or fewer men and that his work remains alive for a longer or a shorter time. So that one must consider him as the representative and the abridgment of a spirit from which he receives his dignity and his nature. If this spirit is only a fashion and reigns only a few years, the writer is a Voiture. If this spirit is a literary form and governs a whole age, the writer is a Racine. If this spirit is the very basis of the race and reappears at each century, the writer is a La Fontaine. According as this spirit is passing, secular, eternal, the work is passing, secular, eternal, and one will well express the poetic genius, its dignity, its formation and its origin in saying that it is an abridgment.

“For it makes abridgments, and the best of all. In this, poets are happier than other great men. Doubtless a philosopher like Hobbes or Descartes, a scholar like Henri Étienne, a savant like Cuvier or Newton sum up in their fashion the broad domain they have chosen; but they have only restricted faculties; moreover they are special, and the field where they retire touches only by a corner the public promenade where all spirits circulate. The artist alone takes this promenade for domain, takes it entirely, and finds himself furnished, to reproduce it, with instruments that none possess; so that his copy is the most faithful, at the same time as it is the most complete. For he is at once philosopher and painter, and he never shows us the general causes without the small sensible facts that manifest them, nor the small sensible facts without the general causes that produced them. His work takes the place for us of the personal and sensible experiences which alone can imprint upon our spirit the precise trait and the exact nuance; but at the same time it gives us the broad ideas of the whole that have furnished to events their unity, their sense and their support. Through him we see the gestures, we hear the accent, we feel the thousand imperceptible and fleeting details that no biography, no anatomy, no stenography could render, and we touch the infinitely small which is at the bottom of every sensation; but through him, at the same time, we seize the characters, we conceive the situations, we divine the primitive or master faculties which constitute or transform the races and the ages, and we embrace the infinitely great which envelops every object. He is at once at the two extremities, in the particular sensations from which the intelligence begins, and in the general ideas at which the intelligence arrives, so much so that he has all its extent and all its parts, and that he is the most capable, by the amplitude and the diversity of his powers, of reproducing this world in face of which he is placed.

“It is speaking very long to write a volume about fables. Doubtless the fable, the humblest of poetic genres, resembles the small plants lost in a great forest; the eyes fixed on the immense trees that grow around it, one forgets it, or, if one lowers the eyes, it seems but a point. But, if one opens it to examine the interior arrangement of its organs, one finds therein an order as complicated as in the vast oaks that cover it with their shade; one decomposes it more easily; one puts it better to experiment; and one can discover in it the general laws, according to which every plant vegetates and sustains itself.”

I shall take care not to put a detailed commentary upon this text; one would have to write a volume; one would have to put, to each of the words, several pages of commentary, so full and strong is the text; and yet one would be a hundred leagues from having exhausted its force and its fullness; and I cannot myself fall into an infinity of detail; besides we shall meet again all these texts, and often; it was the honor and the grandeur of these full and grave texts that they overflowed, that they flooded the commentary; it is the honor and the force of these brave and full texts that they brave commentary; and if no commentary exhausts a text of Renan, no commentary either seats a text of Taine; today, and of this conclusion, I wish to indicate, and in brief, only the sense and the bearing, for the whole and without entering into any detail; I scarcely need say that this sense, in Taine, is much graver, being much cleaner, than were the anticipations of Renan; let us not be deceived by professorial modesty; let us not, moreover, allow ourselves to be lifted by all the indignations that rise in us; I know that there is not a word in all this Taine that does not today raise us in indignation; to attribute, to limit Racine to the seventeenth century alone, to enclose Racine in the century of Louis XIV, when today, having taken all the necessary distance, we know that he is one of the columns of eternal humanity, what unintelligence and what heresy, what coarseness, what presumption, at bottom what ignorance; but neither naivety, nor indignation; it is not here a matter of knowing what Taine is worth; it is not here a matter of his unintelligence and his heresy, of his coarseness, of his ignorance; it is a matter of his presumption; it is a matter of knowing what he wants, what he thinks he has done, finally what we see that he has done, perhaps without thinking of it; it is a matter of knowing, or of seeking, what is, at bottom, the sense and the bearing of his method, the sense and the bearing of the results that he claims to have obtained; what comes out of all of Taine’s book, and particularly of his conclusion, is this singular idea, singularly advantageous, that the historian, I mean the modern historian, possesses the secret of genius.

For truly if the historian is so perfectly, so completely, so totally informed upon the very conditions that form and that fabricate genius, and firstly if we grant that it is exterior conditions, graspable, knowable, known, that form all genius, and not only genius but a fortiori talent, and peoples, and cultures, and humanities, if truly nothing can be hidden from them, from these historians, who does not see that they have discovered, obtained, that they hold the secret of genius itself, and of all the rest, that henceforth they can regulate its production, its fabrication, that in the end therefore they can produce, fabricate, or at least that under their government one can produce, fabricate genius itself, and all the rest; for in the order of the concrete sciences which are not sciences of history, in the physical, chemical, natural sciences, to know exactly, entirely the previous and exterior, ambient conditions that determine phenomena, is literally to have in hand the very production of phenomena; similarly in history, if we know exactly, entirely the physical, chemical, natural, social conditions that determine peoples, cultures, talents, geniuses, all human creations, and humanities themselves, and if truly first these exterior conditions, previous and ambient, rigorously determine the human conditions, and the human creations, if such causes rigorously determine such effects by a causal linking rigorously determining, we truly hold the secret of genius itself, of talent, of peoples and of cultures, the secret of all humanity; one will pardon me for speaking at last a theological language; the frequenting of Renan, if not of Taine, leads me to it; Renan, more warned, more philosopher, more artist, more man of the world, — and consequently more respectful of the divinity, — more Hellenic and thus more warned that the gods are jealous of their attributes, Renan, more informed had hardly usurped anything but the attributes of the all-knowing God; Taine, more withdrawn, more stubborn, more learned, more deep, more child also, being more professor, above all more entire, today usurps upon creation itself; he undertakes upon God the creator.

In his great university frankness and clarity he passes by an enormous degree the precautious anticipations of Renan; Renan would not give purchase to such reproaches; he would not give matter to such criticisms; he would not give course to such ridiculousness; Renan was not worked by these hypertrophies; he himself donned too well the personage of his adversaries, of his contradictors, of his eventual critics; the whole form of thought, the whole of his method, all his tastes, all his past, all his life of work, of measure, of taste, of wisdom guarded him against such exaggerations; he never loved excesses, and, just distributor, as much as and more warned about himself than about others still, he loved them no more in himself and for himself than he loved them in others; he loved the excesses of Renan less than the excesses of others, perhaps because he loved Renan more than he loved others; as a Hellene he mistrusted men, and the immortal gods; as a Christian, he mistrusted the good God; as a citizen, he mistrusted the powers; and as historian, of events; as historian of the gods, and of God, better than anyone he knew how to play with them, and what the limits of the game are; he was a Hellene, an eighth sage; he knew by instinct that man has limits; and that one must not quarrel with too great good Gods; he had therefore familiarly contented himself with giving to humanity, to the historian, the powers of the all-knowing God; he would not have put upon his temple of man a prideful crowning that should brave the thunderbolt.

Haughty, entire, upright, Taine had this audacity; he committed this excess; he had this courage; he made this overstepping; and it is for that, it is for this audacious surpassing that it is through him, and not through his illustrious contemporary, that at last we know, in the domain of history, all the pride and all the pretension of modern thought; with Renan, it was still only a matter, in a marvelous language of audacious complacence, of constituting a distant superhumanity into an all-knowing God by a totalization of historical memory; with Taine on the contrary, or rather beyond, we have cleanly exhausted indefinitenesses, infinities, and infinities of indefinitenesses of detail in the order of knowledge, and of present knowledge; henceforth transported into the order of action, and of present action, we exhaust all the infinity of creation itself; all his form of thought, all his method, all his faith and all his zeal, — truly religious, — all his passion of great conscientious worker, of great hewer of work, and tireless laborer, all his past, all his career, all his life of labor without measure, without air, without leisure, without rest, without anything of happy weakness, all his life without ease and without breathing, all his life of science and the stiffness of his firm spirit and his character and the worth of his soul and the uprightness of his conscience carried him to the completions of thought, constrained him, before the letter, to surpass Renan’s thought, to empty the content of modern thought, pushed him to excesses, and to those crownings of boldness which alone complete the satisfaction of these consciences; he had to have a system, built, as Renan had to have none; he had to have a system, as Renan had only to bring us back certitudes, probabilities and dreams; but, let us know it, his system was the very system of Renan, being the system of the whole modern world; and this common system engages Renan with the same title as Taine; Taine had to add, to the building, to the edifice of his system, this crest, this prideful overcrowning, because what we name pride was in him a defiance to misfortune, to laziness, to bad methods and to unhappiness, not an insult to humility, because what we believe to be a sentiment of pride was for him the sentiment of conscience itself, of the most severe duty, of the most strict method; and it is for that that we owe to him, to him and not to his illustrious compatriot, the revelation that we at last have of the last word of modern thought in the domain of history and of humanity.

There is much fabrication in Renan, but how cautious, attentive, religious, distant, prepared, arranged; it is a fabrication in reserve, a fabrication of dream and of arrangement, surrounded by what cares, by what attentions, delicate, maternal; one shall fabricate this God in a bell-jar, so that he may not fear drafts of air; one shall make special conditions for him; this fabrication of Renan is truly a superhuman operation, a superhuman generation, followed by a superhuman bringing-forth; and Renan’s humanity, or Renan’s superhumanity, if it usurps the divine functions, firstly, we have said it, usurps the functions of divine knowledge, the functions of all knowledge, much rather than the functions of divine production, of all creation, secondly, and this is capital, also usurps, begins by usurping the divine qualities, the divine virtues; this first usurpation, this preliminary usurpation, for us impenitent moralists, excuses, legitimizes the great usurpation; we love that before usurping rights, one should usurp duties, and before power, qualities; finally the accomplishment of this usurpation is so distant; and the precautions with which it is surrounded, precisely by what they have of the minute, by all the care that they require, can so well turn around, be understood as precautions taken so that it may not happen; an operation so distant, so delicate, so minute, does not go without an incalculable number of risks; Renan, great artist, has evidently counted upon the muffled impression that the awaiting and the discounting of all these risks would produce in the reader’s mind; he himself complacently envisages these risks; they attenuate, by a secret hope of liberation, of risk, of adventure, and, who knows, of breakage, let us say the word, of failure, this impression of mortal servitude and of closed completion; they efface perhaps this impression of servitude; and even if they should efface this glacial impression; the author doubtless would easily console himself for it; he does not hold so much as that to the impressions that he gives rise to; these risks alike relieve the reader and the author; through them Renan is not engaged beyond intellectual and moral propriety; he himself envisages them complacently; in this institution of intellectual Terror that we have passed over, putting it off for later, “but do you not think,” says Eudoxus:

“But do you not think that the people, who shall feel its master growing, shall divine the danger and put itself on guard?

théoctiste.

“Assuredly. If the order of ideas that we have just followed comes to some reality, there will be against science, especially against physiology and chemistry, persecutions beside which those of the inquisition shall have been moderate. The crowd of simple folk shall divine its enemy with a deep instinct. Science shall take refuge once again in hiding-places. There may come such a time when a book of chemistry shall compromise its owner as much as a book of alchemy did in the Middle Ages. It is probable that the most dangerous moments in the life of a planet are those when science arrives at unmasking its hopes. There may then be fears, reactions which destroy the spirit. Thousands of humanities have perhaps foundered in this defile. But there shall be one which shall pass through it; the spirit shall triumph.”

Thousands of humanities have perhaps foundered in this defile: Theoctistes tells it to us to frighten us; but Renan, good father, tells it to us because it is true, and also for the sole purpose of reassuring us; he himself thus reassures himself; the realization of his God in a closed vessel terrifies him himself; and it is for that that he puts the realization of the risk in the past, in the indicative, in the indefinite past; it is acquired; it is settled; and the realization of escaping the risk, the realization of God, he puts the realization of God in the future, which is the tense of prophecies; if it is put in the tense of prophecies, religious, if it is a prophecy, perhaps indeed it shall not be realized, let us hope that it shall not be realized; he was paid to know what prophecies are worth, particularly religious prophecies, and how they are realized; to put this affirmation among the rank of prophecies, on his part, was to guarantee to us that it should not confirm itself; a perhaps added to the indefinite perfect shall mask this guarantee to the eyes of the coarse vulgar; but it shall burst forth, quite evident, the language being given, for the insidious reader; in the very preface of these redoubtable and supposedly consoling dialogues, of these redoubtably consoling dreams, the sage warns us against the terrors: “Well seated upon these principles, let us deliver ourselves gently to all our bad dreams. Let us even print them, since he who has delivered himself to the public owes him all the sides of his thought. If anyone could be saddened by them, one would have to say to him as the good curé said who made his parishioners weep too much by preaching the Passion to them: ‘My children, do not weep so much: it is a very long time since this happened, and besides it is perhaps not quite true.’

“Good humor is thus the corrective of all philosophy.”… The realization of his God shall arrive only in a very long time; and it is perhaps not quite true that it must ever arrive.

Nothing of the sort in Taine; Taine was a serious man; Taine was not a man who amused himself, and who played with his amusements; what makes Taine’s case particularly grave, and particularly characteristic, and particularly important for us, and, as one says, eminently representative, is that in his great university honesty he cleanly usurps the functions of creation, and that he usurps these functions for present humanity with a clean brutality.

The only guarantee that one gives us at present is that “a society of anthropology has just been founded in Paris, by the cares of several eminent anatomists and physiologists”; we who today know what it is, in the domain of history, that anthropology is, and what it is, in the republic of sciences, that the society of anthropology is, such a guarantee frightens us more than it reassures us; it is quite perceptibly to present humanity, to the coarse and the feeble humanity, that Taine entrusts not only the government but the creation of this world; it is no longer a matter of a distant, uncertain, negligible, stillborn God; it is to humanity as we know it, to the poor men that we are, that Taine entrusts all the secret and the creation of the world; for example it is he, Taine, the man as we know him, who seizes and exhausts the whole of a La Fontaine, the whole of a Racine; it is present humanity, it is actual humanity that Taine, at bottom, represents to himself as an actual God, realized creator.

Thus Taine’s propositions seem less audacious than Renan’s propositions, because they do not always speak of God, because they do not clothe themselves in a metaphysical and religious language, because he was clumsy, maladroit in religious conversations, coarse, unskilled at speaking God; but they are all the less nuanced, all the less modest on the contrary; and in reality they imply an immediate seizure of the modern historian man, upon the totality of creation; it is because Renan’s propositions clothe themselves in superhuman language that they are modest, sincere, that they do not deceive us about what they contain or wish to reveal of superhumanity; and it is because Taine’s propositions clothe themselves in a simple professorial, modest language, that without his knowledge they deceive us and that, giving us the last word of modern thought in everything that pertains to history, they conceal from us all that they contain and admit of superhumanity.

This last word of modern thought in everything that pertains to history, I know that there is today not one of our professional historians who will not disavow it; and how would they not renounce it; we are today situated at a distance from the beginning; we have received warnings that our elders did not receive; or to which their attention had not been drawn as much as ours; we have received from work itself and from reality rude warnings; from work itself we have received this warning that detail, on the contrary, is at bottom the great enemy, that neither the indefiniteness, the infinity of the previous detail, nor the indefiniteness, the infinity of the interior detail, nor the indefiniteness, the infinity of the detail of creation can be exhausted; and from reality we have received this rude warning that the historian does not yet hold humanity; who would maintain today that the modern world is the last world, the best, who on the contrary would maintain that it is the worst; whether it is the best or the worst, we know nothing of it; the optimists know nothing of it; the pessimists know nothing of it; and the others either; who would advance today that modern humanity is the last humanity, the best, or the worst; the pessimisms today appear to us as vain as the optimisms, because pessimisms are halts like optimisms, and because it is the very halt that appears to us vain; who today would flatter himself to halt humanity, either in the good, or in the bad sense, for a halt of beatitude, or for a halt of damnation; the idea that we receive on the contrary from all sides, from the progress and the clearing up of the concrete sciences, physical, chemical, and above all natural, from the verification and the testing of the historical sciences themselves, from the action of life and of reality, is on the contrary this idea that nature, and that humanity, which is of nature, have infinite resources, both for the good, and for the evil, and for infinities of beyond which are perhaps neither of good nor of evil, being other, and new, and still unknown; it is this idea that our forces of knowledge are nothing beside our forces of life and our unknown resources, our forces of knowledge being moreover ourselves, and our forces of life on the contrary being more than ourselves, that our knowledges are nothing beside knowable reality, and so much the more, perhaps, beside unknowable reality; that there remains immensely to be done; and that we shall not see much of it done; and that after us never perhaps shall one see the end of it; that the old antique adage, according to which we do not know ourselves, not only has remained true in the modern times, and shall doubtless be true for a great number of times still, if, even, it does not always remain true, but that it receives every day new and deeper verifications, unforeseen by the ancients, unexpected, new perpetually; that doubtless it shall receive of them eternally; that the advancement that we believe we see taking shape comes back perhaps only to advancing in the deepening of this antique formula, to finding for it every day new senses, deeper senses; that there remains immensely to be done, and still more immensely to be known; that all is immense, knowledge excepted; above all that one must expect anything; that anything happens; that it is enough to have a good stomach; that we are before an immense spectacle of which we know only ephemeral incidents; that this spectacle may hold all the surprises for us; that we are engaged in an immense action of which we do not see the end; that perhaps it has no end; that this action shall hold for us all the surprises; that everything is great, inexhaustible; that the world is vast; and the world of time still more so; that mother nature is indefinitely fecund; that the world has resource; more than we; that one must not be clever; that the tiny part is nothing beside the whole; that we know nothing, or as much as nothing; that we have only to work modestly; that one must look carefully; that one must act carefully; and not believe that one shall surprise, nor that one shall halt the great event.

Who in our day would dare flatter himself to halt humanity; even if it were in beatitude; even if it were in the consummation of history; who would turn a deaf ear to the warnings that we receive from all sides.

From reality we have received too many rude warnings; at the very moment when I write, humanity, which believed itself civilized, at least somewhat, is thrown a prey to one of the most enormous, and the most crushing wars, that it has ever perhaps sustained; two peoples have confronted each other, with a fanaticism of rage of which one must not only say that it is barbarous, that it makes a return to barbarism, but of which one must avow this, that it seems to prove that humanity has gained nothing perhaps, since the beginning of the cultures, if truly the same ancient barbarism can reappear at the moment one expects it least, all alike, all ancient, all the same, admirably conserved, alone sincere perhaps, alone natural and spontaneous beneath the superficial perfections of these cultures; the uprootings that man has left in the animal kingdom, pushing strange shoots, hold for us perhaps incalculable surprises; and without running to the ends of the earth, among our French themselves, what rude warnings have we not received, and in a few years; who foresaw that in full France all the hatred and all the barbarism of the ancient religious civil wars in full modern period would be on the point of exercising the same ancient ravages; once again who foresaw, who could foresee inversely that the same men, who then combated injustice of State, would be exactly the same who, scarcely victorious, would exercise on their own account this same injustice; who could foresee, both this irruption of barbarism, and this turnaround of servitude; who could foresee that a great tribune, in less than four years, would become a heavy fabulist, and that from the highest claims of justice he would fall to the basest practices of demagogy; who could foresee that from so much evil there would come so much good, and from so much good, so much evil; from so much indifference so much crisis, and from so much crisis so much indifference; who today would answer for humanity, who would answer for a people, who would answer for a man.

Who shall answer for tomorrow; as that gigantic Hugo says, so eternal every time he does not try to have an idea of his own:

No, however powerful one may be, no, whether one laughs or weeps,
None makes you speak, none can before the hour
Open your cold hand,
O mute phantom, O our shadow, O our host,
Spectre always masked who follows us side by side,
And whom one names tomorrow!

Oh! tomorrow, that is the great thing!
Of what shall tomorrow be made?

Thus warned among us, how shall our historian comrades not renounce today the primitive ambitions, the anticipations of the one, the assurances of the other, and the infinite presumptions which have nevertheless instituted the whole of modern thought; how shall they not renounce them, warned as they are in their own work; and how should they even work if they did not renounce them unceasingly; let us know it; every time there appears in the bookshops a book, a volume by a modern historian, it is because the historian has forgotten Renan, that he has forgotten Taine, that he has forgotten all those grandeurs and all those ambitions; that he has forgotten the teachings of the masters of modern thought; and the pretensions to the infinity of detail; and that, quite simply, he has set himself again to work like Thucydides.

And it was not worth so much despising Michelet.

The old ones themselves, Taine, Renan, the others, when they worked, forgot, were constrained to forget their own teachings; their own ambitions; every time a volume of Taine appeared, it was because Taine had, for the practice of his work, for the realization of the result, forgotten to pursue the indefiniteness of detail; every time a book of Renan appeared, it was because Renan had, for this time, renounced the totalization of knowledge; they had chosen; like everyone, like the ancients, like Herodotus, like Plutarch, and like Plato, they had chosen.

Chosen, the great word is there; to choose is a means of art; how to choose, if one absolutely does not wish to employ the means of art; to choose is to make a foreshortening; and foreshortening is one of the most difficult means of art; how then to choose, if one absolutely refuses to employ the means of art; how to choose, finally, in the indefiniteness, in the infinity of detail, in the immensity of the real, without some intuition, without some direct apperception, without some interior seizure; as long as a modern, a historian pursues all the indefinitenesses, all the infinities of detail, and the totalization of knowledge, he is faithful to himself, he works servilely, he produces not; as soon as he produces, were it but a review article, a newspaper paragraph, a footnote at the bottom of a page, a table of contents, it is because he is unfaithful to the pure modern methods, it is because he chooses, it is because he eliminates, that he halts the indefinite pursuit of detail, that he does a work of artist, and by the means of art.

We are thus led to the threshold of the greatest debate of all modern thought; to the heart of the greatest modern contrariety; and it is on this threshold that we shall stop, for today, for it is evident that this simple preface cannot become a treatise, nor even an essay on the manner of writing history; it is already much, perhaps, to have begun to contribute to the positioning of the debate; and we recognize here that this debate is none other than the old debate of science and of art; but it is a new case, and particularly eminent, of this old general debate; on the one side those whom we have named the modern historians, that is to say, exactly, those who have wished to transport, in a block, the modern scientific methods into the domain of history and of humanity; we have today researched their intentions, measured their presumption, not only on eminent examples, on two capital examples, but on the two examples which command the whole movement, being at the origin, at the beginning, at the moment of childlike frankness, and dominating it all; on the other side, in face of the modern historians, and not against them doubtless, for it is a debate, and not a combat doubtless, in face of the modern historians all those of us who do not transport in a block the modern scientific methods into the domain of history and of humanity, who do not servilely transmute the modern scientific methods into historical methods; all those of us who believe that there are, for the domain of history and of humanity, historical and human methods proper; methods humanly historical; we shall stop, for today, at the threshold of this debate; that is enough writing for a cahier, for the preface of a cahier; let us keep some work for ourselves for the watches of this winter; in addition, I arrive at the point of our researches where it would be almost impossible to continue without beginning to speak of Chad Gadya! Now it is an absolute principle in our cahiers that commentary never hinders the text; it has often happened to us to put commentaries in the same cahier as their text; but they were never commentaries that hindered the text; that encumbered it; they were on the contrary, when the text was previously encumbered by misunderstandings, commentaries to disencumber it; I should make it a scruple to call Chad Gadya! as an example, in illustration of a work of research in the very cahier in which Chad Gadya! appears; such poems are not made for the needs of the historians or of the critics of literature; let one read first without any back-thought of utilization this unique poem, this strange and admirable poem; there will always be time to speak of it later; if ever the impression received from the reading effaces itself a little, and thus attenuated permits the considerations to appear without appearing too miserable in comparison with the text.

1. A society of anthropology has just been founded in Paris, by the cares of several eminent anatomists and physiologists, MM. Brown-Sequard, Béclard, Broca, Follin, Verneuil. — Taine’s note.