The nomenclature we have proposed places material wants in the foreground.
The times in which we live force me to put the reader on his guard against a species of sentimental affectation which is now much in vogue.
There are people who hold very cheap what they disdainfully term material wants, material satisfactions: they will say, as Belise says to Chrysale,
“Le corps, cette guenille, est-il d’une importance,
D’un prix à mériter seulement qu’on y pense?”
And although, in general, pretty well off themselves, they will blame me for having indicated as one of our most pressing wants, that of food, for example.
I acknowledge undoubtedly that moral advancement is a higher thing than physical sustenance. But are we so stuffed with declamatory affectation that we can no longer venture to say, that before we can set about moral culture, we must have the means of living. Let us guard ourselves against these puerilities, which obstruct science. In wishing to pass for philanthropical we cease to be truthful; for it is contrary both to reason and to fact to represent moral development, self-respect, the cultivation of refined sentiments, as preceding the requirements of simple preservation. This sort of prudery is quite modern. Rousseau, that enthusiastic panegyrist of the State of Nature, steered clear of it; and a man endued with exquisite delicacy, of a tenderness of heart full of unction, a spiritualist even to quietism, and, towards himself, a stoic—I mean Fénélon—has said that, “After all, solidity of mind consists in the desire to be exactly instructed as to how those things are managed which lie at the foundation of human life—all great affairs turn upon that.”
Without pretending, then, to classify our wants in a rigorously exact order, we may say, that man cannot direct his efforts to the satisfaction of moral wants of the highest and most elevated kind until after he has provided for those which concern his preservation and sustenance. Whence, without going farther, we may conclude that every legislative measure which tells against the material well-being of communities injures the moral life of nations,—a harmony which I commend, in passing, to the attention of the reader.
And since the occasion presents itself, I will here mark another.
Since the inexorable necessities of material life are an obstacle to moral and intellectual culture, it follows that we ought to find more virtue among wealthy than among poor nations and classes. [p078] Good Heaven! what have I just said, and with what clamour shall I be assailed! But the truth is, it is a perfect mania of our times to attribute all disinterestedness, all self-sacrifice, all which constitutes the greatness and moral beauty of man, to the poorer classes, and this mania has of late been still more developed by a revolution, which, bringing these classes to the surface of society, has not failed to surround them with a crowd of flatterers.
I don’t deny that wealth, opulence, especially where it is very unequally spread, tends to develop certain special vices.