“One man is as good as another: that there are degrees of development is due to causes of which we are ignorant, but such or such an illiterate may have moral qualities superior to the moral qualities of those who are more learned than he. In any case, intelligence, if it blesses him who possesses it, does not confer on him the right to exploit or govern others. These differences of development merely imply differences of desires, of aspirations, of ideals; and it is for the individual himself who is so favoured to realise what responds best to his conception of happiness.
“Besides, these differences of development only appear to us as great as they do because education, ill understood and ill distributed, perpetuates prejudices and errors. Imagination, invention, observation, judgment, if they vary somewhat in intensity in different individuals, do not differ in essence. They are simple faculties of our brain which do not lose their quality for being employed to construct a machine or a house, solder a kettle, or make a shirt, rather than to write a romance or a treatise on anatomy.
“Greedy of hierarchy, we humans have divided into high and low occupations the diverse employment of our forces. The parasites who have made themselves our masters, all in proclaiming themselves superior, have established that there is nothing truly noble but idleness, that there is nothing truly beautiful but force exerted to destroy; that force expended to produce, to draw out of the earth and out of industry whatever is necessary to sustain life, is of a vile, inferior quality, and that its use should be reserved to the servile classes.
“On this basis we continue to declare certain occupations low, forgetting that they are such only because one class is forced to pursue them in the service of another class, to submit to its orders and caprices, to abdicate its liberty; but there can be nothing base in no matter what work which consists in ministering to our own needs.
“The artist and the littérateur belong to the masses. They cannot isolate themselves, and inevitably feel the effects of the surrounding mediocrity. It is vain for them to intrench themselves behind the privileges of the ruling classes, to attempt to withdraw into their ‘tour d’ivoire’: if there is debasement for him who is reduced to performing the vilest tasks to satisfy his hunger, the morality of those who condemn him to it is not superior to his own; if obedience degrades, command, far from exalting character, degrades it also.
“To live their dream, realise their aspirations, they, too, must work—for the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses. They, too, must understand that their own development is made up of the intellectuality of all; that, whatever the heights they believe they have attained, they belong to the multitude. If they strain to rise above the multitude, a thousand bonds hold them to it, fetter their action and their thought, preventing them forever from reaching the summits they have glimpsed. A society normally constituted does not admit slaves, but a mutual exchange of services between equals.”
“The very savant, who considers dealing with knowledge the noblest employ of the human faculties, must learn that knowledge is not a private domain reserved for a few adepts uttering oracles before a public of ignoramuses, who take them at their word; and that in science, as in art and in literature, the faculties of judgment, of observation, and of comparison, do not differ from the faculties employed in occupations which we consider more vulgar.
“In spite of the intellectual compression which has held humanity down for so many centuries, science has been able to progress and develop, thanks to the critical spirit of individuals refractory to official teaching and ready-made conceptions. It ought, then, to be put within the reach of all, to become accessible to all aptitudes, in order that this spirit of criticism which has saved it from obscurantism may contribute to hasten its full efflorescence.
“Knowledge is divided into so many diverse branches that it is impossible for the same individual to know them all in their entirety, the duration of a human life being far from sufficient for a man to acquire enough ideas to be able to investigate them in their minutest details.
“To study them,—that is, if he expects to be able to criticise them,—he is forced to have recourse to the labours of his predecessors and also of his contemporaries.