On Reason

Before these studies are themselves studied in their turn, before one is even introduced to them by the author, it is indispensable that the reader be warned that the author appeals therein only to reason. This is indispensable in a time when reason has almost as many enemies as ever, who are dangerous, and when she has more than ever false friends, who are more dangerous still. We must name as enemies of reason those madmen who exercise their madness against reason. And we must name as the false friends of reason those madmen who would have reason proceed by the ways of unreason.

Reason does not proceed by the way of authority. Just as she admits, on the part of the one who teaches, no intimidation, no blackmail or threat, just as she receives no exercise of force, no excess of power, no power, command, abuse, or coup d’État, so she presupposes, on the part of the one who is taught, no cowardice. It is therefore to betray reason, it is to make reason unreason, to seek to ensure the triumph of reason by the means of authority.

Reason does not proceed from governmental authority. It is therefore to betray reason to seek to ensure the triumph of reason by governmental means. It is to fail reason to seek to establish a government of reason. There can be no, there must be no ministry, prefecture, or sub-prefecture of reason, no consulate or proconsulate of reason. Reason cannot, reason must not command in the name of a government. To have a prefect carry out, or to let him carry out, searches in the room of a schoolmistress, even though the prefect be a republican prefect, even though the schoolmistress be not a republican schoolmistress, is not merely to attack liberty, it is to attack reason. Reason does not ask, reason does not wish, reason does not accept that she be defended, or upheld, or that anyone act in her name by the means of governmental authority. In no sense is reason raison d’État. Every raison d’État is a disloyal usurpation of authority over reason, a counterfeit, a piece of bad workmanship.

In particular, reason does not proceed from military authority. She utterly ignores passive obedience. It is to betray reason to seek to ensure the victory of reason by the discipline that makes the principal force of armies. It is to make reason unreason to teach her by military means. Reason does not ask for, does not accept obedience. One does not command in the name of reason as one commands at the drill-ground. There is no army of reason, no soldiers of reason, and above all no chiefs of reason. There is not even, properly speaking, any war of reason, any campaign, any expedition. Reason does not make war on unreason. She reduces unreason as far as she can by means that are not the means of war, since they are the means of reason. Reason does not launch assaults; she does not form columns of attack; she does not carry positions; she does not force passages; she does not make solemn entries; nor does she sleep, like the military victor, on the field of battle.

Reason does not proceed from religious authority. It required an unheard-of insanity to dare to institute the cult of the goddess Reason. And if one may excuse an insanity in a time of madness, let us declare it aloud: the cold political repetition of that insanity, the concerted commemoration of that insanity, constitutes the gravest indication of incoherence or of madness, of unreason. No, reason does not proceed by the way of cult. No, reason wants no altars. No, reason wants no prayers. No, reason wants no priests. It is to betray reason most gravely, it is to make reason unreason most gravely, to disguise her as a goddess, in play-acting and music; it is to betray her to fabricate for her religious festivals, imitations in pseudo-cult, with all the requisite trappings. And even the admirable prayer that Renan made on the Acropolis after he had succeeded in understanding its perfect beauty no longer has any meaning, read or declaimed upon the boards before the inexhaustibly deceived crowd.

Let us declare it without fear. And let us know how to make for ourselves whatever enemies will. Reason wants no Church. There cannot be, there must not be, a Church of reason. Ceremonial, cultic, and ritual practices are totally foreign to the honesty of reason. Superhuman practices, religious, infernal or divine, inhuman, are totally foreign to the humanity of reason. Reason is an honest man. There is no clergy of reason. We have not renounced, we have not denounced the religions of yesterday in order to announce the religion of tomorrow, in order to preach some new religion. We are irreligious of all religions. We are atheists of all gods. In the painful debate between reason and faith we have not left faith for faith in reason, but for the reason of reason. Reason admits neither prophecies nor declamations nor proclamations, — neither dogmas nor decrees of councils nor briefs of popes. And it is to deceive the perpetual people lamentably to present to them the truths of reason in the same tone and as one used to announce to them the so-called revealed truths.

Reason does not proceed from parliamentary authority. She derives neither from those long assemblies which we name parliaments, nor from those brief assemblies which we name congresses. Reason has no president, no assessors, no secretary, no bureau of any kind. She often lacks stenographers. She does not always have minutes or a report. She constitutes no directing committee. She does not proceed by voting. She is not subject to the law of the majority. She is not proportional to number. Many may be deceived. It may be that a single one is right. It may even be that not one is right. Reason does not vary with number. She no more flatters crowds than she used to flatter the great. She no more flatters peoples than she used to flatter kings. She no more flatters democracies than she used to flatter monarchies or oligarchies. We know that in the past there were long times and vast regions in which reason resided only in minorities, in single units. There have even been nations in which reason did not reside. She may absent herself today still.

Reason does not proceed from demagogic authority. To stir up the masses, to set the crowds in motion, is an exercise of authority no less foreign to reason than to amass some majority, to set in motion some regiment. We are today under the government of demagogy much more than under the government of democracy. The tribunes, the lawyers, and the journalists govern us heavily. Free of monarchy, of oligarchy, and of democracy — regular governments — reason is free also of demagogy, government of fact. She is no more subject to the new courtiers than she was subject to the old ones. Neither the demonstrations in the street nor the demonstrations of meetings are worth anything in the eyes of reason. Reason mounts no platforms. The movements of the masses weigh no more than palace revolutions. The deceived people cannot make reason not be reason, and unreason become reason. The deceived crowd can do no more than the deceived monarch could do. The people is not sovereign over reason.

Reason does not proceed from manual authority. As true as it is that reason exercises no authority, as true as it is that the government of the intellectuals would be the most insupportable of governments, — just so reciprocally is it true that reason, who accepts no authority, who submits to no government, accepts no manual authority, submits to no manual government. It is to falsify reason to imagine, as Renan dreamed, a spiritual government of the inhabited earth, an omnipotent government of intellectuals. A republic of pedants would be no less uninhabitable than a republic of monks. If one let it form itself, an intellectual caste would be more irritating and would weigh more heavily upon the world than any caste. But it is also to fail reason to stir up against serious intellectuals the gross authorities of ill-informed manual workers. Justice, reason, the good administration of work require that the intellectuals be neither governors nor governed. Let them be modestly free, like everyone else.

In the present society, where the play of specialization has automatically been carried to excess, intellectual functions and manual functions are almost never assigned to the same workers; intellectual workers neglect almost all work of the hands; manual workers neglect almost all work of the spirit, almost all exercise of reason. In the harmonious city, whose birth and life we are preparing, intellectual functions and manual functions will be shared harmoniously among the same men. And the relation of the intellectual to the manual, instead of being established painfully from one individual to another, will be established freely at the heart of the same man. The problem will be transposed. For we have never said that we would suppress human problems. We wish only, and we hope, to transport them from the bourgeois ground, where they can receive only ungrateful solutions, onto the human ground, free at last of economic servitudes. We leave the miracles to the practitioners of the old and the new Churches. We do not promise a Paradise. We are preparing a liberated humanity.

The audacious chiefs and the blasé crowds, the led leaders, the candidates and the electors will no doubt find that this program is insufficient. But we know by the history of humanity, by the history of the sciences, the arts, philosophy, that a change of plane is an event, a considerable operation. In every kind of work two avenues of progress are open. One can first advance by evolution, continuing in the same direction. But there almost always comes a moment when the worker has the impression that the direction is exhausted: no application, no insistence can any longer draw from the real what the real no longer has in the direction begun. Whole lives consumed in an ungrateful labor would no longer yield what they cost. Then intervenes revolution. Seen from elsewhere, attacked from elsewhere, the real abruptly begins again to flow with full banks. And yet the real is the same as it was. But it is no longer seen with the same gaze, it is no longer seen the same, it is no longer known the same. It is in this way that we are revolutionaries. We wish that the same humanity give itself the new liberty.

We do not despise the past humanities; we have neither this pride, nor this vanity, nor this insolence, nor this imbecility, this weakness. We do not despise what is human in the present humanity. On the contrary, we wish to conserve what was human in the ancient humanities. We wish to save what is human in the present humanity. We avoid above all inflicting on the present humanity the gravest insult, which is to seek to drill her. We have not the presumption to imagine, to invent, to fabricate a new humanity. We have neither plan nor estimate. We wish to free humanity from economic servitudes. Freed, free, humanity will live freely. Free of us and of all those who shall have freed her. It would be to commit the maximum prevarication, the gravest misappropriation, to use liberation to enslave the liberated beneath the mentality of the liberators. It would be to lay for humanity a kind of universal ambush, to present her with liberation in order to draw her into a philosophy, even though that philosophy were labeled the philosophy of reason.

To attach to socialism a system, to bind to socialism, even in the name of reason, a system of science, or of art, or of philosophy, is literally to commit an abuse of confidence toward humanity. To attract humanity toward her liberation only to hurl her into a system is to commit in the name of reason the malversation that the Church committed in the name of faith. It is to sell to humanity what we ought to give her. It is to sell an object that we ought not to let fall into economic commerce. By a liberation it is to introduce her to an enslavement. Let us say more: to sell humanity her economic liberation for the establishment of a system is not only to deceive and to rob humanity, it is not only to betray humanity, it is not only to sell the unsellable, it is not only to laicize the malversation of the Church, to begin again in lay form the prevarication of the Church, which sells to the poor bread for the ticket of confession, for the respectable prayer and for the holy communion, — it is to commit the most grievous crime for a socialist: it is to coin to one’s own advantage economic servitude itself.

To attach to liberating socialism an addition of system so that it may pass along with it is not only an inelegant, ugly, boorish operation, of bad tone, bad bearing, bad culture, bad taste, bad manner; it is not only an immoral, unjust, perverse, inverse operation, of bad administration; it is an operation properly and particularly contrary to socialism. The idealist or the materialist, the determinist or the libertarian who would make socialism with the more or less confused afterthought that their system might be advantaged thereby, would not only play an ugly disloyal game, but their game would be a perpetual denial of socialism; they would not only play falsely, they would play bourgeois. Using for their interested ends the desire, the need, the passion for economic liberation, they would in effect use, at the second remove, the previous enslavement, the very servitude from which we wish to escape. They would not only exercise blackmail, but they would exercise precisely economic blackmail, the proper vice of bourgeois society, of the bourgeois regime.

We have no more the earth to sell than the Christians had the heavens to sell. We have not to laicize the bargainings of the clerics. So far is it from being the case that socialism rests officially upon a system of art or of science or of philosophy, so far from its tending toward the establishment, toward the glorification of a system, so far from its being materialist or idealist, atheist or theist, that on the contrary socialism is what will leave humanity, once liberated, free at last to work, to study, to think freely. It is the effect of a singular unintelligence to imagine that the social revolution would be a conclusion, a closing of humanity within the insipid beatitude of dead quietudes. It is the effect of a naive and bad ambition, idiotic and sly, to wish to close humanity by the social revolution. To make a cloister of humanity would be the effect of the most fearsome religious survival. Far from being definitive, socialism is preliminary, preparatory, necessary, indispensable but not sufficient. It is before the threshold. It is not the end of humanity, it is not even the beginning. It is, according to us, before the beginning. Before the beginning shall be the Word.

Ideas must not be careerist, nor must they be smuggled in. They must not be parasitic, attaching themselves to socialism the way unhappy young men become the secretaries of influential men. The disgust we feel for the petty ambitious who wish to push themselves into the employments of ministerial socialism and into the identical employments of antiministerial socialism, we shall feel toward the systems that would wish to arrive by means of socialism and within socialism. Finally, it is an insupportable abuse of paternal authority to seek to impose upon the new generations the doddering of the tired, old generations that we are. Precisely because we shall have freed them, they will know much better than we what they shall have to think. Reason does not proceed from paternal authority. Let us not make in the name of reason perpetual vows for ourselves. And let us not make any for the perpetual generations. Let us leave humanity in peace. A revolution that intends to rid us of interests must be absolutely disinterested.

Reciprocally, it is to betray reason, as one used to betray socialism, to introduce into the debates of reason additional weights. In the debate of rational systems, to add to certain systems, to materialism, to atheism, the surcharge of socialist wills, to infuse into them the sap and the blood of revolutionary passions, is to falsify the play of action by interventions foreign to action; but reciprocally it is to falsify the play of reason by interventions foreign to reason. It is to procure for certain systems a disproportionate importance in the history of thought. Reason does not proceed from socialist authority, supposing there be a socialist authority. Reason does not proceed from revolutionary authority, admitting that the Jacobins really did institute a revolutionary authority. Reason no more depends upon revolutionary masses than upon reactionary masses or inert masses. She depends upon no forces. She no more depends upon revolutionary armies than upon military armies. She does not depend upon popular masses. She does not depend upon manual authority.

It is to betray reason and to betray the people to seek to establish over the people a government, a command, an authority of reason. But it is also to betray reason and to betray the people to seek to establish over reason, by demagogy or by pedagogy, a government, a command, an authority of the manual workers. Let us understand one another: the manual workers, because they are men, and because they have their share of the common reason, have the right and the duty to think to the measure of their competence. But it is one of the most dangerous modes of demagogy to mask from the people its inevitable, provisional incompetences, which are nonetheless provisionally inevitable. To denounce to the people of manual workers a work of philosophy because it sells for seven-fifty at Alcan’s, to denounce to the people a work of metaphysics because the word God appears fifteen times on page 28 and ninety-two times on page 31, to denounce to the people that work as tainted with clericalism — I say that this is Jesuitism, and I say that this is the Inquisition.

It is Jesuitism and it is duplicity, because the newspaper has two clienteles, two regions. If the newspaper were read only by intellectuals, an indictment of clericalism brought against a philosophical thesis — built up upon the appearance of the word God therein — would not be dangerous, because the reader, forewarned, would recognize there an amusement. An amusement of doubtful taste, rather perverse, but an amusement after all. If the newspaper were read only by manual workers, if the author of the accusation were himself a manual worker, this accusation would be dangerous, but it would be sincere. What makes the duplicity is that an intellectual author deliberately casts this accusation before a double public. The author, an intellectual, knows what metaphysics and theodicy are. The author cannot believe that his accusation exists. And because he has talent, the insidious accusation is enunciated in attentively violent terms. The intellectuals will see clearly that it is a good joke and will not despise the journalist as ignorant. The manual workers will take it at face value. The literary reputation will be saved with the first; the moral reputation will be saved with the second.

I do not believe that anything is so dangerous for the people and for reason as these misunderstandings with double meaning. Monsieur le marquis de Rochefort excelled at it. He knew admirably how to invent the calumny that would make people of wit smile and that would stir up the emotion of the people. To make the calumny gross enough that its very grossness should warn the forewarned that one is forewarned oneself; and to use that same grossness to stir up a gross emotion in the people: at this double game M. de Rochefort was a player believed to be inimitable. Of all the solutions one can imagine to the intellectual-manual problem, this one is the most injurious at once to the intellectuals and to the manual workers, for it presupposes that the intellectuals are so sensitive to the doubtful pleasures of a perverse amusement that they forget therein the simplest elements of common morality, and it presupposes that the manual workers are so eager for gross indignation that they never inform themselves of the well-foundedness, the truth, the justice of the indictments which complaisant prosecutors, which advocates-general of journalism hurl at them.

It is not this injurious, doubtful, double solution that we accept. While waiting for the preliminary change of plane that seems to us capital in the future, in the near history of humanity, when the health of manual labor with the health of intellectual labor shall be devolved upon all men, while waiting for the relation of the manual to the intellectual to pose itself freely in every man, since in the present society the distributions are made between individuals and not between elaborations of the same individual, of the same person, of the same man, since manual labor and intellectual labor are distributed to different individuals, without normal communication, since, with exceptions, few in number, the some scarcely work but with their hands, and the others with their reason, our solution will be the simple solution of professional liberty. For the same reason that bakers do not make houses, and that plowmen do not make clothes, for the same reason the manual workers, bakers and masons, reapers, weavers, and tailors, have neither to make nor to unmake the theses of philosophy.

Just as one does not admit the professional authority of the manual worker over the manual worker in different trades, just so one must admit no professional authority of the manual worker over the intellectual worker. As the bakers are ignorant of building and the reapers of cutting and weaving, just so the bakers and masons, the reapers and weavers, as such, are ignorant of theodicy. One can teach it to them, if there are reasons that one should teach it to them. One can refrain from teaching it to them, if there are obstacles or reasons to the contrary. But it is to flatter them basely to denounce to them by political accusations a work in which they have not yet acquired competence. Let us declare it loudly: a professor of philosophy can and must do theodicy when and as reason demands it. And he is responsible and accountable for his theodicy only before reason, before reasoning reason, before reason at work, before critical reason.

Let us not found, let us not allow to be founded a religion of reason. We have renounced a religion that commanded us to fast on Good Friday; let us not found a religion that would force us to eat meat on that same day. We have renounced a religion that commanded us to believe in a personal God, in three persons, sovereignly good, sovereignly lovable, all-powerful, creator of heaven and of earth, and sovereign Lord of all things; let us not found a religion that would forbid us to pronounce so much as a name of which the least one can say is that it has had a certain fortune in the history of humanity. Reason does not proceed from presbyteral authority. A religion of reason would accumulate all the religious vices together with all the reverses of the rational virtues. It would be a rare, singular, culminating, unique accumulation of vices commonly irreconcilable, habitually separated, logically contradictory. It would be like a wager of accumulation. A catechism is insupportable. But a catechism of reason would hold in its pages the most frightful tyranny. At once parody and text.

Reason no more proceeds from unofficial authorities than from official authorities. Neither the publicist, nor the journalist, nor the tribune, nor the orator, nor the lecturer is today a simple citizen. The journalist who has thirty or fifty or eighty thousand readers, the lecturer who has regularly twelve or fifteen hundred spectators, exercise in effect, like the minister, like the deputy, a governmental authority. One today leads readers as one has never ceased to lead electors. The press constitutes a fourth power. Many journalists, who rightly blame the weakness of parliamentary mores, would do well to turn upon themselves and to consider that the editorial rooms conduct themselves like the Parliaments. There is at least as much parliamentary demagogy in the newspapers as in the assemblies. As much authority is expended in an editorial board as in a council of ministers; and as much demagogic weakness. The journalists write as the deputies speak. An editor-in-chief is a president of the council, as authoritarian, as weak. There are fewer liberals among the journalists than among the senators.

It is the ordinary game of the journalists to stir up all liberties, all licenses, all revolts, and in effect all authorities, most often contradictory, against the official governmental authorities. — We simple citizens, they keep repeating. They wish thus to accumulate all the privileges of authority together with all the rights of liberty. But the true libertarian knows how to perceive authority wherever it rages; and nowhere is it as dangerous as where it clothes itself in the aspects of liberty. The true libertarian knows that there is truly a government of the newspapers and of the meetings, an authority of the journalists and of the popular orators just as there is a government of the bureaus and of the assemblies, an authority of the ministers and of the parliamentary orators. The true libertarian guards himself against unofficial governments as much as against official governments. For popularity, too, is a form of government, and not among the least dangerous. Reason does not build itself a clientele. A journalist who plays with the ministries and who argues from the simple citizen is not admissible. That too is double, and that is too convenient.

When a journalist exercises in his domain a de facto government, when he has an army of faithful readers, when he carries those readers along by vehemence, by audacity, by ascendancy — military means — by talent — a vulgar means — by lying — a political means — and thus when the journalist has become truly a power in the State, when he has readers exactly as a deputy has electors, when a journalist has a reading constituency, often much vaster and much more solid, he cannot afterwards come and play the double game with us; he cannot come and whimper. In the great battle of the powers of this world, he cannot deal formidable blows in the name of his power, and when the opposing powers return his blows, at the same time he cannot claim the standing of the simple citizen. Whoever renounces reason for the offensive cannot claim reason for the defensive. There would be there an insupportable disloyalty, and again duplicity.

Reason does not proceed from terror, which is the acute form of force. Reason does not proceed from suspicion, which is the sly form of terror. The regime of terror, whether it be governmental terror or popular terror no less governmental, even though that regime raised altars to reason, and above all if that regime raised altars to reason, is not a regime of reason. The regime of the suspects, in which the exercise of force exercised is mysteriously enlarged by the fear of force exerciseable, even though the suspects were the enemies of reason, and above all if the suspects were the enemies of reason, — the regime of the suspects is the most contrary to reason. But there is not only to be feared for reason an official regime of the suspects, enlarging some official terror. Still more to be feared, more odious, more an enemy of reason, more hateful is an unofficial regime of the suspects, like that to which the government of the press subjects us. Neither calumnious denunciations nor allegations without proofs are of reason. Reason is not police-like. She is no more press-police than she is State-police.

Reason does not proceed even from that finer and more aerated popularity that is obtained in the regions of culture. Neither State decorations, nor corporative distinctions, nor cooptations, nor professional grades, nor academies, nor scientific festivals, nor fiftieth anniversaries, nor centenaries, nor statues, nor busts, nor names inscribed on street plates, nor banquets, even when one calls them dinners, nor renown, nor glory are properly of reason. All this presupposes some emulation. Now reason does not proceed by emulation. All this presupposes an application to the labors of reason of magnitudes that are not of the same order. Reason admits no rivalry, but only collaboration, cooperation. Every idea of rewards or punishments, of sanctions, however elegant, witty, and psychological, is foreign to reason. In the sciences themselves it is often difficult to proportion the ceremonies to the labors of which they are the consecration. In letters, in the arts, and in philosophy, this is literally impossible. On the contrary the strongest works are also the most unexpected, the least surrounded, or the most envied. Finally, lay ceremonies always resemble religious ceremonies.

Reason does not proceed from historical authority. No more than contemporary majorities can the historical majorities of dead generations command reason. No more than she is always and properly revolutionary is reason always and properly traditional. But she is properly rational, and reasonable. It is to misunderstand her to assimilate her or identify her with revolution; it is to misunderstand her also to assimilate her or identify her with tradition. She is reason. And obeying neither revolution nor tradition, she does not obey either the coincidence of the two, the revolutionary tradition. For by a singular coupling, by an unexpected return, we see more and more the revolutionary thrusts crystallize into traditional forms. More and more revolution, which is the rupture of tradition, tends itself to constitute a traditional apparatus. And in the face of these new revolutionary traditions, doubly new, as being traditions, since they are revolutionary, and as being revolutionary, since they are traditions, reason has none too much of her two proper liberties: the liberty she knows how to keep in the face of tradition, the liberty she knows how to keep in the face of revolution.

In every age the revolutionary movements, the ruptures of tradition, essentially free in their origin, have tended to fall back into the old automatism. Thus conservation began again, tradition was reborn with the very matter that revolution furnished it. But never as today has the revolutionary movement been dampened into forms so traditional, so conservatory. By a strange inconsistency, or by a strange insufficiency of thought, the precedent constituted by the French Revolution, by the great bourgeois revolution, has fascinated the socialist revolutionaries, fascinates them today more than ever. The journées of 1830, the double journées of 1848, the months of the Commune have contributed to form, have completed as it were a revolutionary code. Never as today have the revolutionary parties, the committees, the commissions, the congresses, the councils been so bound, bound themselves, frozen themselves, bound their constituents and their delegates by so much ceremonial, so much etiquette, so much habit, so much protocol, so much tradition, so much conservation.

By a singular mental ingratitude, the revolutionary governments, the socialist authorities oppose to reason, to liberty, of which they were born, supplementary traditions, overburdening conservations. Reason must submit to these onerous traditions neither because they are traditional, nor because they are revolutionary. To imitate the old revolutionaries, the old rebels, does not consist in thinking, in the face of the world which we know, identically the same thoughts that they had in the face of the world which was contemporary to them. But it is indeed to imitate them to have in the face of the world that we know the same attitude, the same sentiment of liberty, of unreason, that they had in the face of their world. To imitate slavishly, punctiliously their ideas, as one would accept an inert, dead heritage, to have in the face of the present world the ideas they had in the face of the past world, to begin our elders again, who were precisely revolutionaries because they did not begin their elders again, to trace their ideas, would be to imitate neither their conduct, nor their method, nor their action, nor their life. It would be to fail to imitate the use they made of reason.

To imitate well the old revolutionaries is to place ourselves freely in the face of the world as they placed themselves freely in the face of the world. It is not to place ourselves slavishly in the face of their world. It is to use reason as they used it, without any school artifice or factitious delay. No more than we must attach to the social revolution and impose upon future humanities our systems, no more must we impose upon them inherited systems, even though inherited from revolutionaries. We must not impose upon them, communicate to them by passing through us ancient systems. We must no more transmit authorities than we must institute them. The operation would be the same. Whether the system imposed later in the name of revolution were born among us or whether we ourselves received it from our elders, the result would be the same. It would always be to mark humanity instead of liberating her. It would always be to bargain and to falsify the enfranchisement. It would always be to oppress reason, to make weigh upon free reason the ancient works of a less free reason. It would always be to coin economic servitude in order to advantage disloyally the revolutionary personnel.

We do not bring with us, we bring neither as an invention nor as an inheritance any unpublished sentiments, fabricated expressly for us, and bearing the mark of that fabrication. We do not intend to replace, to supplant, to put back in the store the old sentiments that have made the joy or the consolation, the happiness and the beauty of the world. We have no new sentiments which would replace the ancient love, friendship, the affections, the sentiments and passions of love, the sentiments and passions of art, of the sciences, of philosophy. We are not gods who create worlds. We wish to become useful stewards, wise managers, diligent housekeepers. We do not ask to create animalities or humanities, but modestly we ask that the economic goods of the present humanity be administered for the best, so that, economic servitude being lifted from the napes of necks, the free heads may stand up again, the bodies may live in health, the souls also. We are above all modest. A proud socialism would be an aberration. A metaphysical one would be criminal or mad.

Reason does not proceed from pedagogy. We touch here upon the gravest danger of the present time. Despite the complicity of the very words, pedagogy must not be demagogy. It is pedagogy that must take its inspiration from reason, guide itself by reason, model itself upon reason. After having suffered from our negligence, the people must not today be deformed by our complaisance. After having suffered from the ignorance in which it was left, it must not today be deformed by a half-knowledge, which is always a false-knowledge. This is the immense danger of primary teaching, with its indigestible encyclopedic programs; it is still more the immense danger of higher primary teaching; it is to the highest degree the immense danger and the immense difficulty of the popular universities. Admirably devoted individuals, perfectly wise, understanding persons, prevent, avoid the danger, turn, surmount the difficulty, but they are also the first to have measured them. Those who love the primary — the schoolteachers and the people — instead of exploiting them, are precisely concerned for them.

It would be irreparably to falsify the mind of the people, it would therefore be to betray the most numerous reason, to make the most numerous reason unreason, to encourage general insanity, to cultivate madness and sow unreason with full hands, to make or to let the people of manual workers, at the various degrees of primary teaching, believe that the labor of reason obtains its results without pain, without effort, and without apprenticeship. All the more so since the people knows full well, the people admits full well, better than the bourgeois, the people knows by its professional experience that in no order of manual labor does one obtain gratuitous, given results. In all manual trades everyone knows that one must work and that one must have learned. By what unjust inferiority, or by what at-bottom-demagogic complaisance, by what flattery would one make the people believe or let it believe that science, that art, and that philosophy, that intellectual labors, that the labors of reason are not just as serious.

It would be to render to democracy the worst of bad services to vulgarize, to extend to the people of workers the old noble prejudice. The people too must not wish to know everything without ever having learned anything. The people too must not have given itself only the trouble of being born people. One would never have the idea of making bread without having learned baking, nor of plowing without knowing plowing. Why does one wish to treat of the great problems without having done the indispensable apprenticeship. One grants approximately to science that it demands an apprenticeship; but one denies it too often to letters, to the arts, to philosophy. One would thus introduce the most dangerous presumption; one would prepare for oneself the gravest, the most deserved disappointments. What one must teach the people is neither a vanity nor a pride, it is intellectual modesty, and that justness which is the justice of reason. Instead of launching it upon the existence, or, what amounts to the same thing, the inexistence of God, upon the immortality of the soul or upon its survival or upon its mortality, upon determinism or indeterminism, upon materialism or the philosophy of history, let us teach it modestly matters more ready. That alone will be honest. And it is only thus that we shall respect it.

Not that we wish to forbid the people access to reason. It is we on the contrary who do not wish that it go and break its nose at false doors. We ask that it advance reasonably, wisely, rationally in the ways of reason, as far as it can, but in full probity. Reason makes no use of the lie, even though the false would be shorter. If one is before an audience that does not understand the demonstration of the theorem pertaining to the square of the hypotenuse, one must not fabricate a false but graspable demonstration leading to the same proposition and present it to the people with the back-tranquillity that it makes no difference since the true demonstration furnishes an eternally valid assurance, a certitude. No: one says honestly to those who are not geometers: The geometers demonstrate that the square constructed on the hypotenuse is equivalent to the sum of the squares constructed on the sides of the right angle. — One must not forget that most of the great problems are more difficult and demand more preparation than the theorem of the square of the hypotenuse.

Not that, in order to ensure the independence, the full liberty of reason, we wish to institute for her some kingdom outside of and above humanity. It is within humanity itself and for humanity that we intend reason to function. It is the common interest of reason and of humanity that humanity hear the voice of reason. The two interests are here inseparable. But the functioning, the labor of reason has this proper to itself, that in this labor one must sacrifice nothing to outward success. Reason must penetrate humanity more and more; reason must insert herself more and more into action, but on this condition that by this penetration, by this insertion reason be never breached. The advantages that reason draws from her proper labor and the advantages that reason and humanity draw from her propagation are not advantages of the same order which balance one another and which can be equivalent. But the proper advantages of reason at work are rigorously conditional, constitute the indispensable condition without which the outward advantage is annulled.

One must work as well as one can to make reason advance in her proper labor; one must work as well as one can to make reason enter into the action of humanity, but these two efforts are not of the same order; the second is rigorously conditioned by the first. The first is absolutely free of the second.

Reason is not everything. We know, by reason itself, that force is not negligible, that many passions and sentiments are venerable or respectable, powerful, profound. We know that reason does not exhaust life, and even the best of life; we know that the instincts and the unconsciousnesses are of a more profoundly existing being, no doubt. We estimate at their value confused thoughts, impressions, obscure thoughts, sentiments, and even sensations. But we ask that one not forget that reason is for humanity the rigorously indispensable condition. We cannot without reason estimate at its just value all that is not of reason. And the very question of knowing what falls to reason and what does not fall to reason, it is only by the labor of reason that we can pose it to ourselves.

What we ask only, but what we ask without any reservation, without any limitation, is not that reason become and be everything, it is that there be no misunderstanding in the use of reason. We do not defend reason against the other manifestations of life. We defend her against the manifestations which, being other, wish to give themselves out as her and thus degenerate into unreasons. We do not defend her against the passions, against the instincts, against the sentiments as such, but against the madnesses, against the insanities. We ask that one not make the people believe that one speaks in the name of reason when one employs means that are not the means of reason. Reason has her own proper means, which she employs in the arts, in letters, in the sciences, and in philosophy. These means are by no means disqualified for the study we must make of social phenomena. It is not when the matter of the study is particularly complex, mobile, free, difficult, that we can deprive ourselves of an important tool, or that we must falsify it.

Charles Péguy