IV

The complete works of Remy de Gourmont cover almost every form of intellectual activity. He seems equally at home in criticism, in creative effort, "novel, play, poem," philosophy (Nietzsche owes much to him for his intellectual acclimatization in France), in the transvaluation of moral values, in social criticism, in certain aspects of science, in philology, in the renovation of rhetoric. "In his divers attitudes and in his varied researches," says Dumur, "he was the expression of our instable epoch.... When the most distant posterity shall wish to form an idea of what we were between the years of yesterday's estheticism and tomorrow's neo-classic realism, of what our immense literary production was, of what the generation was which bridged the conflict of 1870 and the great war which began in 1914, the page it will have to read will be signed Remy de Gourmont."

The importance of this writer, however, cannot be limited to France; by token of his broad, tolerant humanism and his dynamic method he belongs to the literature that abolishes boundaries and epochs.

[HELVÉTIUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HAPPINESS]

"M. Helvétius, in his youth," says Chamfort, "was as handsome as love itself. One evening, as he was seated very peacefully before an open fire, at the side of Mile. Gaussin, a renowned financier came and whispered into this actress's ear, loud enough for Helvétius to hear: 'Mademoiselle, would it be agreeable to you to accept six hundred louis in exchange for a few favors?'—'Monsieur,' she replied, loud enough to be heard by Helvétius, and pointing to him at the same time, 'I'll give you two hundred of them if you will kindly call on me tomorrow morning with that fellow over there.'"

Helvétius was not content with being very handsome. He was also exceedingly wise, very rich, and very happy. No mortal, perhaps, received so many gifts from the gods, the rarest of which was Mme. Helvétius, one of the most charming and gifted women of the eighteenth century. Like her husband, she was very beautiful,—so beautiful that persons paused, struck with admiration, to look at her. There is, in this connection,—quoting again from Chamfort, a very pretty anecdote:

"M. de Fontenelle, aged ninety-seven, having just uttered to Mme. Helvétius, young, beautiful and newly wed, a thousand amiable and gallant remarks, passed by her to take his place at table, without raising his eyes to her. 'You can see,' said Mme. Helvétius, 'how much stock I may take in your compliments; you pass me by without so much as looking at me.' 'Madame,' replied the old man, 'if I had looked at you, I would not have passed by.'"

Happiness is often egotistical. It is even a question whether a certain egotism is not necessary to the acquirement of a certain happiness. Helvétius gave a peremptory denial to these sorry notions. Happy himself, he had but one passion: the happiness of humanity. He noticed, in his observation of mankind, that the natural desire to be happy, which each of us bears within, is opposed by a thousand prejudices, the most terrible of which are the religious prejudices, and he determined to combat them with all his strength. M. Albert Keim, who knows Helvétius better than any other man in France, has just republished certain notes written in the philosopher's hand; the first of which runs thus:

"Prejudices. They are to the mind what ministers are to monarchs. The latter prevent their rivals from approaching the king, and in the same way prejudices prevent truths from reaching the mind, for fear of losing the power they usurp over it."

One of the most widespread prejudices is that which considers it impossible to attain happiness; as that does not prevent us from desiring it, such an idea corrupts life and often renders it unbearable. Priests have believed that they could remedy this by inventing a second life, where the person who has consented to be quite unhappy in the first will find at last a sort of equivocal happiness, little calculated to tempt one of intelligence. The people, nevertheless, snap at this bait and accept, in view of future recompense, the direst tribulations of the present life. Thus a frightful slavery is perpetuated, for it is very evident that all this is nothing but a hoax and an imposition. Whoever wishes to taste happiness, if this word stands for anything more than a dream, should set about it in this life, since the other one is but a chimera, lucrative for the clergy alone. But how be happy? Through virtue? Very well, what is virtue?

"Virtue," replies Helvétius, "is only the wisdom which harmonizes passion with reason and pleasure with duty."

He assigns a large place in life to pleasures and passions; but he does not consider them only as elements of happiness; he makes of them sources of activity. Man instinctively seeks pleasure. When he has experienced it, and later loses it, he will work with all his might to win it anew. All forms of pleasure, then, are easily reconcilable to virtue. Who knows whether pleasure taken in wise moderation is not virtue itself? And he dares to write this maxim, which will perhaps frighten some: One is never guilty when one is happy. Helvétius, who was a very gentle and kind person, is often, in his writings, rashly bold. His intimate notes are violent, impassioned, even brutal. He speaks in them of love with magnificent frankness, and one readily divines that it is chiefly in the exercise of this amiable virtue that he found happiness.

I am not at all writing here a study of Helvétius, one of the most skilful demolishers of the ancient regime; I am running through a portfolio of private notes, printed at first in a few copies, and the reading of which will reveal at once an ingenious philosopher and the most spirited of poets. He is, on the subject of love, inexhaustible; he is in turn tender, subtle, passionate, raving. His delirious attacks are of a beautiful candor; the majority of his thoughts are charming and most seductive: "Each moment of pleasure is a gift of the gods."

This verse, which would be greatly admired and celebrated if it had been found in André Chenier,—does it truly come from the pen of Helvétius? This is what M. Albert Keim asks himself. That is a query to propound to the erudite spirits of l'Intermédiaire, who have read all the old authors; in the meantime I consider it as being highly characteristic of the philosophy and the poetry of the author of Bonheur (Happiness). One can imagine nothing more pagan, more gently anti-Christian. And anti-Christianism is the real basis of Helvétius' philosophy. He oversteps the bounds a trifle when he adds: "Pleasure is the sole occupation of life." The ardor of this young man is excessive. He himself will soon learn and declare that life has other employments, such, for example, as composing a philosophy.

His second motto will be: "Minerva and Venus in turn," which is wisdom itself; he will devote himself to plucking at once "the fruits of reason and the fruits of pleasure." He is forever recurring to voluptuousness, whose images pursue him: "Who takes all pleasures takes very few of them." Love to him is the most noble of passions because it is the fecund passion and mother of life. This is what makes him say: "It is not, moreover, without a certain secret melancholy," for, he avers, "The flower that one plucks is ready to wither."

Do you wish to see him in his rôle of a serious philosopher? He will say, as if he foresaw the war against science, in which, in our own days, we have seen the Veuillots and the Brunetières distinguish themselves: "There are things over which the veil of skepticism should be spread; but, in the matter of science, it would be necessary, in order to win the right of skepticism, to know all that the human mind may learn: then one might permit himself to declare that science is nothing." Like the modern positivists, like Renan, remarks M. Keim, Helvétius had the greatest confidence in science. He is forever celebrating the triumphs of human intelligence. He believes in progress, in the transformation of society by the scientific mind. Thus he launched a powerful attack against Rousseau's thesis upon the ills of civilization. Yet at times one notes in him a little discouragement, and he will confess: "Almost all philosophical views are worthless. Not that they are not excellent, but because there are too few persons who can understand them."

The number of persons who can understand Helvétius has greatly increased, and besides, it is not so difficult as he believed; all one needs is a little common sense. It is a good sign of our intellectual health that Helvétius is coming back into fashion. Tomorrow it will be d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Tracy, the master of Stendhal,—all those eighteenth-century philosophers who are so clear, so simple, so human. The absurd German metaphysics has annihilated them for sixty years, but it seems that the day of their revenge has come. The dry notion of abstract duty according to Kant has outlived its day. It is beginning to be understood that man's first duty is to be happy. Otherwise, what is the use of living?

[THE PLAYER'S ILLUSION]

The player at games of skill is always tempted to attribute to himself a capacity superior to his real power. Such is the theorem advanced in a curious study, half psychological and half algebraic, by an Algerian engineer, Monsieur V. Cornetz. The player's desire to win, the recollection of his past successes, his confidence in himself, necessarily cause him, at a given moment, to think himself stronger than he really is. So that, if he wins, he is not surprised; but if he loses, he will tell himself: "I could have done better; I didn't do my best, I didn't concentrate all my attention." For such an estimate of himself to be just, it would be necessary for the player to base the idea of his strength not only upon the average of his previous victories, but also of his defeats. Self-conceit, however, prevents unsuccessful contests from coming to his mind to counterbalance the remembrance of his winnings. It comes about, then, that the player constantly overrates himself, and in all good faith. Whatever be his character, he is never tempted to attribute to himself a value less than his real worth. The modesty of certain players is all upon the surface and the mistrust of themselves, which they proclaim, is transformed into excessive confidence as soon as the game has begun. A player is a man who always compares himself to other men. He judges himself, not as an individual independent of his surroundings, but under the pressure of a vanity that is ever egged on by the presence of rival vanities. The moment two such vanities clash, each of necessity seeks victory, and begins by attributing to itself, without the least regard for reality, the strength necessary for success. To accept the combat is in itself, is it not, to believe that one is the stronger?

Monsieur Cornetz deals particularly with the chess-player, but his observations, as he himself says in his preface, are applicable to all games that are not purely games of chance, and even to athletic contests, fencing matches, and one might add, military operations, even of the most serious nature. To wage battle is to play a game. This psychology of the player is also that of the general. How many battles have been lost because the general overestimated himself. How many governments even have fallen because they were abandoned to the illusions of their self-conceit! Does not Napoleon III gayly setting out for the frontier provide the spectacle par excellence of the player who overrates himself? There is no such thing as a disinterested contest; the dullest game of cards excites in the opponents a certain desire to win. The very persons who boasted of their entire detachment are often the most eager to win once the game has started; they enter into it excitedly and when worsted keep watching for a favorable opening. Those players who believe that they play the game for the sole interest of its combinations, its emotions, are then, admitting their good faith, the victims of an illusion: they judge themselves to be other than they are. This is a rather common attitude in life. We all of us believe ourselves more or less to be other than we really are; so much so that an ingenious philosopher, M. Jules de Gaultier, has created a special term by which to denominate this universal penchant. He calls it Bovarysm, referring to the heroine of Flaubert's novel, who thought herself a grande amoureuse when she was really nothing but a poor little sick woman. The player who pretends that he plays without any interest in victory is afflicted with Bovarysm. But perhaps he is also intent upon shielding his self-conceit in case of failure. Beaten, he will vow that he had as good a time as if he had won. This is a manner of self-consolation that does not lack a certain elegance. The fox who found the grapes too sour has furnished us with a charming example of this disdainful attitude. M. Cornetz has seen, in Algiers, on an old Arabian chess-board, this motto: "The loser always has his excuse." The basis of these excuses is this: "I should have played otherwise. If I had used such and such a pawn, or queen, or card, I would doubtless have won." Who has not been present at those post mortems where the players forget only this, that they know, at the moment of discussion, things that they did not know while the game was in full swing? The truth is that at a given moment, when one is seriously playing the game, one is playing as well as he can, no more and no less. The loser has an excuse; very well. But it is precisely because he is the loser. The winner needs none. To be winner is a fact; to be loser is another. There is in facts a logic, and the reason of the strongest is always the best. To believe, when one has been beaten, that one might not have been, is by that very fact to suppose that one might, at that moment, have been another person, which is absurd. But perhaps this illusion is due to inevitable causes. The chief point is, as I have already said, that at the moment when we have been beaten we recall, not our former defeats, but rather our former victories, and the victories only. We attribute to ourselves a general capability, a capability that is a matter of principle, and which may not be shaken by an accidental momentary inferiority. It never occurs to us, "our vanity prevents it," that our real worth is probably but a fairly equitable composite of equally accidental inferiorities and superiorities. The balance will always incline toward the side of our self-conceit.

It should be recognized that, if this illusion of our self-conceit has its great inconveniences, if it vitiates our critical judgment, not only of ourselves but of others, if it betrays us into false estimates, it possesses, on the other hand, great advantages. "The illusion that accompanies man in the course of his life," says M. Cometz, "is a necessary condition of existence, a precious product of the vital instinct." The man who overestimates himself is also he who is capable of surpassing himself. It is necessary, in this great game of life, to have confidence in oneself. If one estimated oneself only at his proper value, one would not estimate himself sufficiently. If we did not grant to ourselves a power superior to our real power, we would never dare to undertake the impossible; now it is perhaps only the impossible that is worthy of being undertaken. From the purely practical point of view, if the end to be attained were not embellished by illusion, would we ever set about the task? It is well for a man, after a game of chess, to be able to say in all simplicity: "I could have played otherwise." That is not true, of course, but it may create in the future a great truth. Error is a great generator of truths. The truth of today has its root in the error of yesterday. Illusions have often created real powers. "You could do better," says the teacher to his pupil. He thus implants in the child's mind a belief, an idea which will at once engender a hope, and in the future, a force. Then let us not scoff too gayly at the player who has such firm confidence in himself. Doubtless this selfsame confidence will lead him to accept unequal battles in which he will be worsted; but it will happen also that he will emerge victor from struggles into which he would not have dared to venture had not beneficent illusion considerably magnified in his eyes his real capacity. And finally, it happens in many cases that the real worth of a person coincides with the estimate placed upon him by his self-conceit. One need not trust to it too much; it's only a matter of a game. On the other hand one need not on that account fear to repeat the old proverb: "Nothing venture, nothing have." All languages of the world have similar proverbs. This helps to show that all peoples have recognized that certain efforts are impossible without certain illusions, and that, of all principles of action, the most powerful and the most fruitful is still self-confidence.

[THE BEYOND]

Much is being said of the beyond in these days, perhaps because people no longer believe in it. Then there is Eusapia Palladino, whose performances, it seems, favor mysterious beliefs. Tables dance and tilt, violins play by themselves, and this puts perspicacious folk on the road to the beyond. Huysmans was converted in just this way. It is far easier to confuse the human reason than the laws of gravity.

Nevertheless, what is the beyond? I believe only in that country which I can locate. Where do you place it? The spirits locate it about us. Do you wish to speak with Mme. de Montespan? Here she is. With Napoleon? He hastens to respond. Would you consult Saint Anthony in regard to some lost object? Nothing more easy. The inhabitants of die beyond are at our disposal. They come as soon as they are bidden and reply most gently. And in order to prove that the two realms bear a strong resemblance to each other, they are even glad to talk plenty of nonsense: their intelligence never rises above the level of those who summon them.

This benevolent and familiar beyond does not, however, win universal approval. The immense majority of believers need a truly mysterious beyond, one that shall be inaccessible and unfathomable. Where is this beyond? Yonder, yonder, very far away.—But just where?—Far, far off, I tell you; farther than you could ever calculate.—And how are you assured of its reality?—By reason itself. It is impossible that man should die totally. This is proved by his very desire for immortality.

The early Christians were not in the least embarrassed in the matter of placing heaven. They beheld it on high, beyond the clouds, in a brilliant, serene region. Christ, by his ascension, had shown them the way. The expression has gone into the language: to rise to heaven. It no longer means anything since it has become known that the earth rotates on its own axis and that, consequently, there is for us in space neither above nor below. In order to rise to heaven at midnight one would have to take the same direction by which, at noon, he would descend. Heaven, then, cannot be situated on high. As to hell, which was formerly placed in the interior of the earth, let us not speak. The theologians of today make many reservations as to hell; they have learned that the prospect of cooking eternally in a huge caldron is not of a nature to excite much religious enthusiasm in the crowds. The beyond to which we are invited is a benign place. It is not quite the paradise of Mahomet; it is that of Fénélon,—a perfumed landscape where the streams are of milk, the pebbles of candy, the soil of chocolate. It still remains to locate this celestial confectionery in space.

Some have thought of the planets. But suppose they are really inhabited, as M. Flammarion hopes, and as is moreover fairly probable? Then let us seek farther, farther still. Let us question the uttermost stars,—those which our naked eye cannot see,—even those that the telescopes will never discover.

Their answer is known. They reply that they are worlds, suns, surrounded by earths, some living like ours, others dead like the moon. Analogy permits us to believe that what we do not see resembles greatly what we do see. If we were transported to the regions where simple folk place the beyond, we would turn back to our own earth and say, doubtless: The beyond is situated yonder.

There is no reasonably conceivable beyond. The entire universe is built upon the same plan and its component parts are limited by nothing. An immensity in which grains of sand whirl about at the mercy of the wind of infinity.

Beyond—Beyond what? One must know what he is talking about. We are creatures habituated to precision. When a man of the fourteenth-century thought of future life, his notion was very simple, but fairly clear. He beheld the blessed ranged upon the steps of a vast stage. In the background was an organ, played by an angel, and the music was so sweet that the whole audience was spell-bound: and this was to continue for all eternity! Today we would with difficulty accept such a paradise fashioned in the manner familiar to the devotees of large concerts. A little variety would be welcome. The taste for extended travel, for example, has gradually influenced the notion that certain persons form of the blessed life. Whereupon it becomes a paradise for Cook's tourists. Excursions are made to the rings of Saturn, just as, in their earthly life, they journeyed to the White Nile or to Japan. Somewhat farther than the first, but of the same genre.

The most ardent travelers rise, in their imaginations, from sun to sun, thrilled with the idea of a never-ending exploration filled with ever-renewed wonders.

These perpetual vacations seem a bit boresome to me. What will be proposed to me next? Here are the modern religions and philosophies, the Christians and the spiritualists, who offer me the contemplation of God. Very well. But God is no more admirable in the rings of Saturn or in Sirius than in the wings of a butterfly or in the eyes of a woman. What next? Wait. You speak of a woman,—doubtless of her whom you love? Here is the paradise of Mahomet, with its white, buxom houris, their hands ever perfumed, their caresses ever new.

Yes, that is more tempting. It is human, at least. But do the women, too, find lovers to their taste there? This paradise bears too much resemblance to a conquered town, where the victors disport themselves with the women captives. And it resembles altogether too much something less honest. At the end of an hour I should feel like leaving.

Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and mobile. I do not believe that it exists everywhere; I believe that it is nowhere except in our infantile imaginations. Born with us, it will end at the same moment that we do, to be born anew in our posterity.

The beyond is the earthly tomorrow, as we bequeath it to our heirs and as they modify it by their efforts and in accordance with their tastes.

[THE QUESTION OF FREE WILL]

Those physicians were wise who, at a recent congress, voted to refuse making any statement upon the problems of responsibility propounded to them by the courts. What does responsibility mean? Where does it begin? What are its boundaries? One finds himself here not in the presence of a question of simple legal medicine; to speak of responsibility is to speak of free will, and to speak of free will is to be plunged into the fundamental mysteries of human philosophy. These mysteries, to tell the truth, are mysteries only because it is to man's interest that things should be so. We are accustomed to consider human acts as free acts, voluntarily consented to; the adoption of a contrary view would so interfere with our habits that social life would become exceedingly difficult. Our teachers or experience have taught us that our body is capable of two kinds of movement,—the one involuntary and necessary, such as respiration, or the circulation of the blood, and the other voluntary, accomplished at will,—the movement of our limbs, our tongue, our lips. But a closer examination would soon show us that this division is very arbitrary. It is impossible for us to make our heart stop beating; but is it really possible to stop our finger from moving, and if it is, for how long? We can cease eating: but for how long? We can even stop breathing; for how long? In reality, the freedom of our bodily movements, if it exists, is a limited freedom, a freedom exercised within a very narrow circle,—the freedom of a prisoner who can pace back and forth in his cell. Similarly, the exercise of our external activity is subjected to rather strict conditions: we can speak, walk, work in a thousand different ways, but during a certain time only. At the end of this time we feel that our freedom is exhausted we are at the end of our chain. There is nothing more to do: we must obey. In whatever direction we may turn we behold looming forth the obstacle that will certainly bar our way. Sometimes there is annexed to the prison a little courtyard where we may walk about a little, but this courtyard is itself only a prison: the boundary has been set back a few paces, that is all.

If we now pass to the examination of the most delicate organs of our body,—the brain and the nervous system,—we see that the motions executed within these organs are likewise limited in their evolutions. I employ these simple terms expressly, that I may be better understood. We perceive these motions in the form of sensations or thoughts. Are we free to be hot or cold, to be hungry or thirsty? Are we independent of the ideas that come to us, the images that are formed in our mind, that is to say, our brain? No, most assuredly. At least, then, we are free to receive them or reject them, to show them the door or smilingly invite them in? Here we reach the crux of the question, for it is at this point that the will intervenes. What, indeed, is the will? The will is nothing more than the realization, effected by our mind, that of two motives one is more powerful than the other. The will is perhaps the least voluntary and the least free element in our make-up. Before it declares itself, we are often in a state that gives us the illusion of liberty. We are still in ignorance as to whether we shall go to right or to left. These moments of vacillation are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disagreeable. Most often they pass unperceived, and we find ourselves started on one of the two paths, totally unawares. Our will has acted mechanically. Our mind has worked like an automatic scale.

Whatever we do, there is a cause, and this cause itself depends upon another, and so on to infinity. If I am at this moment smoking a cigar, it is because Christopher Columbus discovered America. The search for causes leads to authentications of this order. But our acts have only a single direct cause. Several influences have combined and weighed upon the lever. Often, when we reflect upon the motives for our acts, we imagine that we have found them, yet the most important motive has escaped us. To enter into examples of this would be to enter the absurd; Pascal has given one which has become famous,—his epigram about Cleopatra's nose. It is saying little to aver that effects and causes are united like the links of a chain. I see effects and causes rather in the guise of an extremely complicated fabric, of which every thread depends upon the others. But such a representation may not be made materially. Let it suffice for us to understand and to admit that none of our actions is the beginning of a series. There is only a single series, which does not seem to have had a beginning and whose end it is impossible to foresee.

Notwithstanding, we have the sentiment of liberty, and consequently, of responsibility. These are very curious illusions and very mysterious, but illusions none the less. Among those of which our life is composed, they are perhaps the most useful; they are even more,—they are necessary. We are not free, yet we cannot act except by believing ourselves free. If for a moment we actually ceased to believe in free will, we should at once cease to act altogether. In his book on Duplicisme Humain, M. Camille Sabatier has written: "Liberty is as inexplicable as it is certain." It is, in my opinion, the illusion of liberty that is as inexplicable as it is certain, and, I add, necessary. Where I agree fully with him is when he asserts that the matter presents "a mystery of our nature." He has attempted a most ingenious explanation, but which, I believe, leaves still standing the determinist objections, of which I have summarized several of the features. It is the eternal opposition of feeling and, not reason but reasoning. But it matters little whether they teach and adopt one or the other theory; that could have no influence upon the conduct of men or upon their judgments. Nor would it have any influence upon our manner of looking upon crime and the various infractions of the law and moral conventions. If men are free and consequently responsible, there need be no change in our judicial institutions. If men are not free, if they are irresponsible, there need still be no change, for a crime is a crime just the same,—always an anti-social act against the repetition of which it is necessary to protect ourselves. It even seems that the determinists, to whom I belong, would be inclined rather to a very severe repression. A philosophic doctrine is not necessarily a social doctrine. A determinist, doubtless, could not admit the idea of punishment, but he will readily admit that of repression. And it all comes to the same thing. We must live. Societies have no choice. But it is easy to understand why the physicians, who are almost all determinists, should have resolved not to take a stand upon questions of responsibility. That is not within the province of medicine, which should limit itself to declaring whether the subject is healthy or ill, and to caring for him if he is entrusted into its hands.

One may, moreover, in agreement with Dr. Grasset, and also with the facts and common sense, admit that there are mentally sick persons, and that these persons vary as to the degree to which they are affected, that is to say, they are more or less conscious, more or less able to resist their impulses. The hypothesis of determinism cannot make us forget all the visible shades of difference between the normal individual and the typical madman. The normal man receives varied impressions, external and internal; some impel him to action, others hold him back: he establishes an equilibrium. Normal life is nothing but that,—a state of equilibrium, a static condition. The man who is termed abnormal is, on the contrary, more or less constantly out of balance. He is impelled by one force that is not counterbalanced by another: he falls. When the wind blows always from the same direction upon a row of pines, it bends them all in the same direction. If the wind, though violent, blows alternately from opposite directions, the trees remain erect. These rows of pines will provide us, not with the image, but with the schema of the normal and the abnormal man. Neither one nor the other,—and the man as little as the tree,—is responsible either for the origin, or the power, or the direction of the wind which bends them and straightens them in turn or, on the contrary, breaks them forever as if they were mere reeds; there remains however, the fact, that while the one kept itself erect in a healthy posture, despite occasionally rude shocks, the other, subjected to a constant pressure, bent over from day to day with its head nearer to the ground, or even, as the result of a more than usually violent tempest, broke altogether.

It is a fact, and one must keep it in mind when he passes judgment upon trees or upon men. It is a fact, and that is all. Nevertheless, if the tree has been uprooted by a violent tempest, there is nothing left but to call the wood-cutters, who are the judges of trees. If they inquire into the cause of the disaster, it will be through pure curiosity; their business does not lie there; they know their duty and will perform it.

When we shall have exhausted all the arguments for and against all the degrees of responsibility that may be discovered in a healthy or a sick person, we shall find ourselves in agreement with the social wood-cutters, with the magistrates, on the necessity of removing and forever ridding society of him. Then, having once more become philosophers, we shall try to reach agreement upon this point: that it is a matter not of administering punishment but of preserving ourselves; our interest should be centered not upon the author, but the purpose of the crime. Let us not even speak of crime; let us speak of danger. Ah! How simple it all would be, or at least more simple than at present, if the notion of criminal act was superseded by that of dangerous act. The idea of crime is a metaphysical idea; the idea of danger is a social idea. The opinions of MM. Baudin, Faguet and de Fleury, which frighten M. Grasset, are in principle highly acceptable. On the occasion of each new crime society cannot institute a new philosophical debate nor set about resolving questions which, ever since there have been men who think, have troubled human thought. For some time they have not been asking the jury for their opinion upon the materiality of a fact; they subject them to an examination in philosophy. It's ridiculous.

There are on one side the assassins and on the other the assassinated. What difference does it make to me whether the fellow who'll split my head be an apache or a lunatic? What does matter to me, is to live. I feel intense compassion for the sick, but I am very anxious that persons suffering with madness be shut in.

All men are ill, said Hippocrates. We all need care; so I see nothing wrong about criminals attracting special attention from the medical corps. There are so many interesting cases among them!

[THE INSURRECTION OF THE VERTEBRATES]

It is well known how the spiritualists tried to capture Pasteur, because his theories, denying spontaneous generation, seemed to them his consecration of the old dogma of a Creator. Pasteur never professed such ideas; he limited himself to pursuing brilliantly his profession as a scientist. It was not without a feeling of sadness that, pestered by the admiration of a too pious gentry, he wrote to Sainte-Beuve, I believe: "Let us continue our labors, without giving heed to the philosophic or religious deductions that may be drawn from them."

Well, here is that same gentry trying, very maladroitly moreover, to turn to their profit the results of a new scientific theory which is beginning to make a stir in the world,—the law of vital constancy. M. Dastre expounded it the other day at the solemn session of the Institute and demonstrated its supreme importance. If one is eager to keep abreast of intellectual novelties, one should possess some notion of this recent scientific theory; just as one would blush not to possess any notion of Darwin's labors and the theory of evolution, which has now become a part of general culture.

Man is the product of an evolution the origin of which is contemporaneous with the very origins of the world. He has as ancestors not only men, but reckons in his genealogy all manner of animal species. His descent from the monkey through the medium of a semi-human form that is still little known, is today authenticated. The monkey, like all other mammals and also the marsupials (kangaroo, opossum) is a transformation of a reptile; the reptiles, to continue, were born of fishes, who are the first vertebrates to appear, and the fishes in turn descend from the annelides, humble little marine animals. But let us not go any farther back than the fishes, for, in this species we possess a certainty that may be daily demonstrated. At a certain stage of its development the human embryo has the chief characteristics of a fish. All of us were, at a certain moment of our unborn life, fishes; this is as certain as the most easily verified scientific fact. From this piece of evidence, and a hundred others, it has been possible to draw up this aphorism, which unites the evolution of the individual to general evolution: "Every individual, in his embryonic development, goes through the same phases through which the evolution of his species has gone in traversing the ages."

This monumental discovery of the transformation of species is, as we know, due almost entirely to Darwin. It is he who propounded and demonstrated the principle of evolution. But if, in his so abundant books, he explained the how, he did not discover the why. He registered facts, but did not show why these facts should have been absolutely necessary. It is this gap which the theories of M. Quinton now fill, at the same time confirming in a brilliant manner the selfsame principles of Darwinism, evolutionism and transform-ism. Before M. Quinton, one might, strictly speaking, with a semblance of good faith, contest Darwin's conclusions: henceforth, it is impossible: the facts are interconnected; we know their necessary, implacable cause. Thanks to M. Quinton, evolutionism should rather be termed revolutionism.

There are in this theory, two things to consider: life itself, and the environment amid which it develops. Life is a fixed phenomenon. It began in a marine milieu, at the very beginnings of the world, and it tends constantly to preserve, through all the transformations of a terrestrial milieu, the original conditions of its appearance. As a consequence, the most highly developed animals, the superior animals, among which man takes first place, are those which have been able to preserve in the interior of their bodies, in the form of blood, a vital milieu almost identical with the original marine milieu,—the environment in which life was born: in fact, the degree of saltness in our blood represents the saltness of the sea at the moment life made its appearance, and, moreover, our internal temperature represents the mean temperature of the globe at the moment our species was born.

The terrestrial milieu is unstable. Its heat has constantly diminished. Formerly, in the most remote epochs, the vicinity of the poles, now an ice-covered and inaccessible extent, had a climate hotter than that of the tropics. Life was born amid this tropical environment, at the bottom of an ocean that had a far higher temperature than the Caribbean sea or the sea of Java. Nevertheless the poles grew colder and all the other parts of the world as well. Then animal life found itself faced with this alternative: either to accept the new conditions of the milieu, or to rebel against these conditions,—struggle and maintain internally despite the external temperature, the high temperature of its origin.

That is a solemn moment in the drama of the world. What is to happen? If the new conditions are accepted, it spells fatal decline. If they are repulsed, it means a magnificent future development. Almost all animal life submitted: it is today represented by the lowest class of living creatures: the invertebrates. A single representative of the animal world revolted, made a prodigious effort, entered into strife with the hostile milieu and dominated it: the vertebrate. Thus life, in its superior aspects, affirmed itself from the very earliest times as an insurrection.

M. Quinton, says: "The vertebrate stands forth as marked by a particular character, which distinguishes him from the rest of the animal kingdom, giving him a position apart, above. While the balance of the animal kingdom accepts, or rather undergoes, in the face of the progressive shrinking of the seas and the cooling of the globe, the new conditions that have come about, and to which it can yield only at the cost of intense suffering, the vertebrates give evidence of a special power; they refuse to accept the conditions and confronted by hostile circumstances maintain the sole conditions favorable to their existence.... They are not, then, like the invertebrates, the passive toys of circumstances that dominate them, but, in part, the masters of the fundamental conditions necessary to their welfare. In the midst of the physical world that surrounds him, ignores him and oppresses him, man is not the sole insurgent, the only animal in revolt against the natural conditions, the only one tending to found, in an instable, hostile medium, the fixed elements of a superior life. The simple fish, the simple mammal ... hold the essential physical laws in check. When man attacks the natural forces that surround him, in order to dominate the hostile elements in them, he first participates of the genius of the vertebrate."

I have purposely underscored the words sole insurgent. These words, in fact, indicate the orientation of our efforts the moment we attempt to apply the biological principles enunciated by M. Quinton to the social domain. Far from teaching stagnation, resignation, acceptation, he counsels on the contrary, if one understands him, revolt against all that bars the progress of life and the maintenance of its highest conditions of power and intensity. These ideas are related to the basic ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy: we must grow or succumb. It is the same with individuals and persons as with the animal species: those who accept the conditions provided by their traditional environment, those who do not react, are condemned to decadence: they are invertebrates. The traits of a superior organism, on the contrary, are reaction through deep, continued evolution, or by a brusk revolution against the mediocrity of the milieu which tends to dominate and reduce it.

In certain places it is freely asserted that the peoples of the future are the wise peoples slumbering in the tradition of a political order, of a religious order, or a moral order: those peoples, on the contrary, are in their decline. But there is something worse: there are political—or social groups that dream, not of attaining to the genius of the vertebrate, which spells perpetual combat against the hostility of the environment, but of becoming once again invertebrates, and of falling asleep gently in the lap of ancient traditions.

There is, according to the theories of M. Quinton, in the social realm as in the biological, a fixed point, and one that must remain fixed unless decline is to set in, and that is life; but we must not confuse life with the environment in which it evolves. Life is constant and the milieu is variable. The most diverse political and social institutions have been successively imagined by man to assure, according to the needs of the moment, the development of his life. And as, in the course of time, they have appeared to him insufficient, he has rejected them to imagine others more in confirmity with his requirements: and thus social progress appears as a necessity, in the same way that anatomical progress has transformed an ocean worm into a fish and the fish into a mammal or a bird. In the two cases there is a certain end sought. It is for man to create for himself the social conditions that will permit his life to maintain its loftiest aims.

When the social conditions that the old regime brought about in France appeared to men unsuited any longer to the maintenance of their life, they acted like good vertebrates,—they revolted. Civilization is nothing but a succession of insurrections, now against the hostility of physical forces,—especially against the cold,—now against social forces, which, after a period of usefulness, tend almost always to evolve in the direction of parasitism.

[THE PESSIMISM OF LEOPARDI]

Leopardi has never been widely read in France. While Schopenhauer has achieved a certain literary popularity, Leopardi has remained, even for scholars, in the shade. This is due in large measure to the mediocrity of his translators and his commentators....

Leopardi's poetry is difficult to enjoy. M. Turiello says that it is obscure even to Italians of the present generation. It is true that Leopardi is somewhat addicted to archaism and that, moreover, the Italian language has since his day undergone rapid development under the influence of French. His prose, despite its severe form, now too concise and now a trifle oratorical, is more approachable.... But if translation, is always a difficult task, it is particularly difficult to translate Leopardi.

In prose as in verse he is a pessimist more by nature than as a result of reasoning. It is his sensibility rather than his intellect that speaks. He constructed no system; he gathers his impressions, his observations, and attempts, not without arbitrariness, to generalize them. His philosophy is entirely physiological: the world is bad because his personal life is bad. He conceives the world in most terrifying fashion, and supposes that if all men do not judge it as he does, it is because they are mad. Optimism, in fact, is fairly widespread. While there is life there is hope. The fable of Death and the Wood-cutter is a fair symbol of humanity's out-look. On the other hand it is certain that literatures and philosophies, even those which aim to produce laughter as well as those which exalt life, are generally pessimistic. There is a tragic background to Molière's plays and a gloomy background to Nietzsche's aphorisms. Absolute, beatific optimism is compatible only with a sort of animal insensibility and stupidity: only idiots are constantly laughing and are constantly happy to be alive. Absolute pessimism, however, can develop only in certain depressed organisms: its extreme manifestations are plainly pathological and connected with maladies of the brain.

Schopenhauer affirms that life is evil, yet he loves it and enjoys it. Let fame come, and he expands with cheer. His character is by no means gloomy. He is at the same time a philosopher and a humorous writer. Leopardi never knew these expansions. He affects to despise even glory, for which he nevertheless labors. But he, too, is a keen, witty spirit, although ever bitter; and he, too, is a humorist. He certainly takes pleasure in writing. If he does not know life's other joys, he knows that of being able to impart a beautiful, puissant form to a lucid thought. Nevertheless his existence, much more logical than Schopenhauer's, is in exact accord with his philosophy. Sickly, isolated, not understood, Leopardi lacked the strength to react; but if he allowed himself to be swept along by his sadness, it was at least in full knowledge of the fact. He questions his despair and enters into discussion with it. And this questioning presented us with those fine dialogues which, together with a few thoughts, were gathered together under the title Operette Morali.

Leopardi died in 1837. His writings seem of this very day. Almost all the questions touched upon with unparalleled sagacity in the Dialogue Between Tristan And A Friend are such as still interest philosophers and critics. "I understand," says Tristan, "and I embrace the deep philosophy of the newspapers, which, by killing off all other literature and all other studies of too serious and too little amusing a nature, are the masters and the beacon-light of the modern age." Already, in his day, the flatterers of the crowd were saying, like the Socialists of today: "Individuals have disappeared in the face of the masses." Already sober stupidity affirmed: "We live in an epoch of transition," as if, resumes Tristan, all epochs and all centuries were not a transition toward the future!

The theme itself of the dialogues is the idea of the wickedness of life and the excellence of death. It recurs time and again and Leopardi manages to avoid monotony only by the ingeniousness of his imagination, the beauty of his style, the keenness of his wit. For example, the magnificent passage in which, after having said that although the world is rejuvenated every spring it is continually growing older, he announces the supreme death of the universe: "Not a vestige will survive of the entire world, of the vicissitudes and the infinite calamities of all things created. An empty silence, a supreme calm will fill the immensity of space. Thus will dissolve solve and disappear this frightful, prodigious mystery of universal existence, before we have been able to understand or clarify it."

Without a doubt. But in the meantime we must live, or else die. And if we choose to live, it is reasonable to do our best to adapt ourselves to life. Pessimism has but the slightest of philosophical value. It is not even a philosophy; it is literature, and, too often, rhetoric. This man is a bit ridiculous, tranquilly pursuing his existence, daily adding a page to his litany of death's delights. In short, Leopardi, like many another man, humble or exalted, suffers from not being happy; his originality consists less in taking pleasure in his suffering, which is not very rare, than in finding reasons for this pleasure and expounding them logically and resolutely. His sincerity is absolute.

Considered in opposition to the base reveries of the promissors of happiness, this literature is useful. But it is good that it should be rare, for if we finally got to take pleasure in it alone, it would prove only depressing. Life is nothing and it is everything. It is empty and it contains all. But what does the word life mean? It is an abstraction. There are as many lives as there are living individuals in all the animal species. These lives are developed according to curves and windings of infinite variety. It is the height of folly to bring a single judgment to bear upon the multitude of individual lives. Some are good, others bad, the majority colorless, according to every possible degree. In this order of facts there is no justice, and the reign of justice is particularly chimerical in this case, because the joys and sorrows of a life are related far less to the events by which it is crossed than to the physiological character of the individual.

Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be fully felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heart-beats and these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous grief nor a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.

Whether we deal with the transcendental theories of Schopenhauer or the melancholy assertions of Leopardi, we arrive at the same conclusion. Pessimism is not admissible, any more than is optimism. Heraclitus and Democritus may be dismissed back to back, while fearlessly and with a moderate but resolute hope, we try to extract from each of our lives,—we men,—all the sap it contains, even though it be bitter.

Leopardi was not only the poet and the moralist of despair. At the age of seventeen he had already achieved note as a scholar and a Hellenist, with his Essay Upon Popular Errors Of The Ancients (1815). During the two years that followed he produced several dissertations on the Batrachomyomachia, on Horace, on Moscus, and Greek odes in the manner of Callimachus, the perfection of which was such that it was believed some forgotten manuscript had been brought to light. Niebuhr affirmed in 1822 that the Notes On The Chronicle of Eusebus would have done honor to the foremost German philologists. Leopardi had reached this point when in a flash his personal genius was revealed to him, and then there appeared his Poems, followed by his Moral Tracts. He died at the age of thirty-nine (1837), leaving a series of labors of which each separate division achieves perfection: the scholar, the poet, the writer of prose, the translator, the man of wit are equally admirable in Leopardi. Were it not for the lingering illness that accompanied his deeply sensitive career, he would have been one of the most luminous geniuses of humanity. His originality lies in his having been the most sombre.