3. The sciences and arts are born of and nourish idleness. Their least mischief is uselessness.[116]
4. The letters and arts engender luxury, and luxury is one of the powerful instruments of corruption in morals: it destroys courage, lowers the character, and, by another consequence, depraves and corrupts the taste even.
5. Another consequence: the culture of the mind engenders sophisms, false systems, and dangerous doubts about religion and morality.
These various arguments, taking them up one after the other, may be answered as follows:
1. It is nowise proved that in the age of ignorance vices were less numerous and less deeply rooted than in the more enlightened age. Decency is a good in itself, and is not always hypocrisy. Delicacy of mind robs at least vice of its grossest features; it diminishes and allays violence, which is a great source of crimes.
2. It is not true that military virtues (which, besides, are not the only admirable virtues) are destroyed by the culture of the mind: modern examples prove this sufficiently.
3. To say that the letters and sciences are born of and nourish idleness is an abuse of words. Wherein is the man who works mentally more idle than he who works with his hands?
4. The sciences and letters do not develop a taste for luxury: luxury would develop without them, and would be all the more frivolous and corrupting: they are concomitant, but not mutually related facts. Luxury, besides, is not absolutely bad in itself: the taste for elegance is a legitimate one. Is not nature herself adorned?
5. Science develops wrong opinions, false systems: so be it; but it also corrects them, and we should look at both sides of a thing and see its good parts as well as its bad. Otherwise it would be easy to prove that everything is wrong.
Rousseau’s paradox, however, is not altogether false, and there are, unquestionably, many evils mixed up with the culture of the mind, but these evils do not come from the mind’s being cultivated, but from its being badly cultivated; they do not come from people’s seeking the true and the beautiful, but, on the contrary, from their not seeking them enough. The vanity derived from false science should not be imputed to true science, but to ignorance. The moral enfeeblement, which is the result of an over-refined culture of the mind, comes from our not sufficiently cultivating the mind in every direction; for example, from our neglecting the moral sciences for the industrial sciences, or the nobler arts for the voluptuous arts. The remedy for the evils pointed out by Rousseau is, therefore, not ignorance, but, on the contrary, a greater abundance of light, and higher lights.