The capacity for infinite progress is, thus, not shown by the present state of our civilization. Man has been able to learn some things, but has forgotten many others. He has not added one sense to his senses, one limb to his limbs, one faculty to his soul. He has merely explored another region of the circle in which he is confined, and even the comparison of his destiny with that of many kinds of birds and insects does not always inspire very consoling thoughts as to his happiness in this life.
The bees, the ants, and the termites have found for themselves, from the day of their creation, the kind of life that suited them. The last two, in their communities, have invented a way of building their houses, laying in their provisions, and looking after their eggs, which in the opinion of naturalists could be neither altered nor improved.[[102]] Such as it is, it has always been sufficient for the small wants of the creatures who use it. Similarly the bees—with their monarchical government, which admits of the deposition of the sovereign but not of a social revolution—have never for a single day turned aside from the manner of life that is most suitable to their needs. Metaphysicians were allowed for a long time to call animals machines, and to assign the cause of their movements to God, who was the “soul of the brutes,” anima brutorum. Now that the habits of these so-called automata are studied in a more careful way, we have not merely given up this contemptuous theory; we have even recognized that instinct has a capacity that raises it almost to the dignity of reason.
In the bee-kingdom, we see the queens a prey to the anger of their subjects; this implies either a spirit of mutiny in the latter, or the inability of the former to fulfil their lawful obligations. We see too the termites sparing their conquered enemies, and then making them prisoners, and employing them in the public service by giving them the care of the young. What are we to conclude from such facts as these?
Our modern States are certainly more complicated, and satisfy our needs in larger measure: but when I see the savage wandering on his way, fierce, sullen, idle, and dirty, lazily dragging his feet along his uncultivated ground, carrying the pointed stick that is his only weapon, and followed by the wife whom he has bound to him by a marriage-ceremony consisting solely in an empty and ferocious violence;[[103]] when I see the wife carrying her child, whom she will kill with her own hands if he falls ill, or even if he worries her;[[104]] when I see this miserable group under the pressure of hunger, suddenly stop, in its search for food, before a hill peopled by intelligent ants, gape at it in wonder, put their feet through it, seize the eggs and devour them, and then withdraw sadly into the hollow of a rock,—when I see all this, I ask myself whether the insects that have just perished are not more highly gifted than the stupid family of the destroyer, and whether the instinct of the animals, restricted as it is to a small circle of wants, does not really make them happier than the faculty of reason which has left our poor humanity naked on the earth, and a thousand times more exposed than any other species to the sufferings caused by the united agency of air, sun, rain, and snow. Man, in his wretchedness, has never succeeded in inventing a way of providing the whole race with clothes or in putting them beyond the reach of hunger and thirst. It is true that the knowledge possessed by the lowest savage is more extensive than that of any animal; but the animals know what is useful to them, and we do not. They hold fast to what knowledge they have, but we often cannot keep what we have ourselves discovered. They are always, in normal seasons, sure of satisfying their needs by their instincts. But there are numerous tribes of men that from the beginning of their history have never been able to rise above a stinted and precarious existence. So far as material well-being goes, we are no better than the animals; our horizon is wider than theirs, but, like theirs, it is still cramped and bounded.
I have hardly insisted enough on this unfortunate tendency of mankind to lose on one side what it gains on the other. Yet this is the great fact that condemns us to wander through our intellectual domains without ever succeeding, in spite of their narrow limits, in holding them all at the same time. If this fatal law did not exist, it might well happen that at some date in the dim future, when man had gathered together all the wisdom of all the ages, knowing what he had power to know and possessing all that was within his reach, he might at last have learnt how to apply his wealth, and live in the midst of nature, at peace with his kind and no longer at grips with misery; and having gained tranquillity after all his struggles, he might find his ultimate rest, if not in a state of absolute perfection, at any rate in the midst of joy and abundance.
Such happiness, with all its limitations, is not even possible for us, since man unlearns as fast as he learns; he cannot gain intellectually and morally without losing physically, and he does not hold any of his conquests strongly enough to be certain of keeping them always.
We moderns believe that our civilization will never perish, because we have discovered printing, steam, and gunpowder. Has printing, which is no less known to the inhabitants of Tonkin and Annam[[105]] than in Europe, managed to give them even a tolerable civilization? They have books, and many of them—books which are sold far cheaper than ours. How is it that these peoples are so weak and degraded, so near the point where civilized man, strengthless, cowardly, and corrupted, is inferior in intellectual power to any barbarian who may seize the opportunity to crush him?[[106]] The reason is, that printing is merely a means and not an end. If you use it to disseminate healthy and vigorous ideas, it will serve a most fruitful purpose and help to maintain civilization. If, on the other hand, the intellectual life of a people is so debased that no one any longer prints such works of philosophy, history, and literature, as can give strong nourishment to a nation’s genius; if the degraded press merely serves to multiply the unhealthy and poisonous compilations of enervated minds, if its theology is the work of sectaries, its politics of libellers, its poetry of libertines,—then how and why should the printing-press be the saviour of civilization?
Because copies of the great masterpieces can be easily multiplied, it is supposed that printing helps to preserve them; and that in times of intellectual barrenness, when they have no other competitors, printing can at least make them accessible to the nobler minds of the age. This is of course true. Yet if a man is to trouble himself about an ancient book at all, or gain any improvement from it, he must already have the precious gift of an enlightened mind. In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries. A man must be already worth something before he thinks of entering these august portals; but in such times no one is worth anything....
Further, the length of life assured by Gutenberg’s discovery to the achievements of the human mind is greatly exaggerated. With the exception of a few works which are from time to time reprinted, all books are dying to-day, as manuscripts died in the old days. Scientific works especially, which are published in editions of a few hundred copies, soon disappear from the common stock. They can still be found, though with difficulty, in large collections. The intellectual treasures of antiquity were in exactly the same case; and, I repeat, learning will not save a people which has fallen into its dotage.
What have become of the thousands of admirable books published since the first printing-press was set up? Most of them have been forgotten. Many of those that are still spoken of have no longer any readers, while the very names of the authors who were in demand fifty years ago are gradually fading from memory.