Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

Man still believes himself the last achievement of the creative power. Darwin, corroborating the Bible, ushered the human couple out of the shades on the sixth day only; and the leading scientists take the same stand—a fact which favours those dubious books in which the questionable concordance of Science and Faith is celebrated. But Darwinism is on the eve of disappearing before preciser notions. To-morrow we shall no longer be obliged to believe that the creator of the universe, having organized the lower species without moral ideas, invented man for the purpose of depositing in his brain a principle which it had got along very well without itself, in the course of its preparatory labours. If man is no longer the latest arrival,—if he is a very old animal in the history of life,—if the flower of the life-tree is not Adam but the Dove,—then the whole metaphysic of morals will collapse. What! after the masterpiece, Man, He (or She, according to which meaningless word may be professed) humbles Himself to make the Bird! What! the stork after Abraham's ancestor! Yet so it is. M. Quinton's labours[1] will no longer permit us to doubt it. It becomes certain that the human intelligence, far from being the goal of creation, is only an accident, and that moral ideas are but parasitic vegetations arising from an excess of nutrition. The phenomena of intelligence, moral consciousness, and all the titles of nobility engrossed on the parchment, might perfectly well, no doubt, have appeared in any other species whatsoever. The birds, whose evolution is as yet incomplete, will not, perhaps, be exempted from them. Their arterial system is superior to man's—simpler and stronger. They can eat without interrupting their breathing. They steal, they speak, they can recite the Rights of Man or the Nicene Creed—supreme achievements of large numbers of men. The bird, chronological king of creation, has remained, till now, and in spite of its improvements, an animal. The bird series does not seem, in point of intelligence, superior to that of the mammals, among which Man figures as an inexplicable exception. Intelligence could then be regarded as an end, only if each of the animal species were rigorously determined and stationary. This is M. Quinton's opinion, at least provisionally. The species, since they are species—since the individuals which compose them are reproduced in beings identical with themselves—the species, such as they are defined, by these very syllables—spec-i-es—may disappear, but they can no longer change. Man has quite certainly passed through various states in which he was not a man; but the day man produced a man, humanity began immutable. It is then possible that human intelligence, instead of being an accident, a derogation, was determined, from the beginning, like the human hand, the human feet, the human hair. It would then have a normal, logical rôle in the universe, and its very excess—genius—would be but exuberance of energy. But we should still have to explain the bird's stupidity. Is it, perhaps, an evidence of the intellectual degeneration of the creative forces? The most probable opinion is that intelligence is an excrescence, like an oak-apple. To what insect's bite do we owe it? We shall never know.

It matters little whether the intelligence be, as Taine believed, a normal product of the brain, or a malady, especially as a blemish, transmitted as such from generation to generation, ends by losing its pathological characteristics. It becomes an integral and normal part of the organism.[2] Its accidental origin is, however, corroborated by this, that although an excellent instrument for a priori combinations, the intelligence is, one would say, especially unfitted for the perception of realities. It is to this infirmity that we owe metaphysics, religions and ethical systems. As the external world can reach the consciousness only by scrupulously conforming to all the nooks and crannies of the pocket, it turns out that, believing to hold an image of the world, we have only an image of ourselves. Certain rectifications are possible. Analysis of the phenomena of vision has made us admit that. By comparing our sensations and our ideas with what we can comprehend of the sensations and ideas of others, we arrive at a determination of probable averages; but, above all, negative averages. It would be easier to draw up a list of non-truths than a list of truths. To affirm that a given religion is false, no longer denotes great boldness of intellect or even much intellect. The veracity of any religion whatsoever is to-day a subject for controversy only for the various European clergies who make their living out of it, or for those belated rationalists who, like their master Kant, are ever awaiting the propitious and lucrative hour for opportune conversions. But, to the naïve question presented by those who, like nature, in the seventeenth century, abhor a vacuum:—"What will you put in its place?"—no answer can be made. It is enough, and it is no small thing at that, to have transmuted a truth into a non-truth. The higher calling of criticism is not even, as Pierre Bayle proclaimed, to sow doubts; it must destroy. The intelligence is an excellent instrument of negation. It is time to employ it, and so stop trying to rear palaces with picks and torches.

The history of the idea of immortality is a good example of our congenital inability to perceive realities otherwise than reshaped and worked over by the understanding. The idea of immortality is born of belief in the double. In sleep, and while the body is inert, there is a part of man that stirs, that travels, that fights, that eats, enjoys or suffers, exhibits all the phenomena of life. This part of man, this double of man, this astral body, survives the decomposition of the material body, whose habits and needs it keeps. Such, doubtless, is the origin of the belief in what, since Hellenism, we call the immortality of the soul. In an earlier stage, the Egyptian religion was based upon the theory of the double. It was for doubles, and not for souls, that first real, and later symbolic, food was placed in the tombs. But the Egyptian religion was already charged, in addition, with the idea of justice, of equilibrium. The doubles were weighed in the scales of good and evil. Ethical metaphysics had obscured the primitive idea of immortality, which is nothing but the idea of indefinite duration.

For theologians, for philosophers—if there still be any to profess these honest doctrines—for the common run of men, the idea of immortality, or of the future life, is intimately connected with the idea of justice. Eternal happiness is a compensation accorded human sorrows. There are also—but these are for theologians only—personal torments to punish infractions of priestly orders, which tortures are, moreover, an additional recompense for the good, and a guarantee against promiscuity. We have here an aristocratic selection, but one based upon the idea of good and bad, instead of upon that of strength and weakness. These strange reversals of values enraged Nietzsche. They should be accepted as at least transitory consequences of civilized man's sensibility. Primitive man, whose nervous vibrations are few, and whose intelligence is passive, feels suffering, though dully, but does not feel injustice, which is moral suffering. To encounter a similar state we must cross the middle regions, and question a Goethe, a Taine or a Nietzsche—men in whom intelligence has finally conquered by its very excess, repelling the pleadings of pity and the sentimental pitfalls of justice. If the idea of immortality had been born in a superior intelligence, it would have differed only by its greater logic from the brutal conceptions of primitive humanity.

M. Marillier has collected and co-ordinated all that which, in the beliefs of the uncivilized, relates to the survival of the soul.[3] The ensemble of the facts shows that the idea of justice has had not the slightest share in forming the conception of the idea of immortality. There have been few discoveries more important for the history of human beliefs. The idea of immortality was, at first, as M. Marillier has the hardihood to assert, a purely scientific conception. It is the magnification and prolongation of a fact—of a fact badly observed, but still a fact. The future life is the continuation of the present life, and involves the same customs, the same pleasures, the same annoyances. This world also has a double: the other world. The bad and the good, the strong and the weak, continue there as here. Sometimes life, without change in the relations of its elements, is more clement in the other world. Sometimes, in the same conditions, it is worse. But, whether the future life be considered as better or worse, it is the same for all. Better still, it implies perfect equality in those commonplace pleasures which are the average ideal of the civilized man as well as of the savage. The tribes of New Guinea, rendered anaemic by hunger, dream of eating unlimited sago throughout eternity. As it would be possible to discover, even in this egalitarian paradise, some vague idea of compensation, hence of justice; we must go farther, to Java, where paradise—doubtless because of an excessive toll—was accessible only to the rich; to those resigned races, where alone the kings, the priest and the nobles, were saved; to Borneo, where the hereafter, divided into seven circles, corresponded to the seven circles of the social hierarchy. In another corner of the great island, "every person whom a man kills in this world becomes his slave in the next." There we have a paradise clearly based upon the idea of force, and a belief which laughs a little at the categorical imperative. Not only is the weak not "recompensed," but his weakness and his suffering may, through the caprice of the strong, be raised to the infinite. The slayer has acquired an immortal profit. Societies in which there is poetry, art, laughter, love, still exist with such a morality. The fact may sadden, but it does not surprise us; for it is evident that we have here a terrible element of resistance against foreigners. Such a system has its drawbacks. From time to time, in Borneo, a band of young Dyaks who have not yet killed, dash into a town and slay. Having thus gained immortal life and a slave, they remain more tranquil thereafter. Among the Shans, a man killed by an elephant forfeits paradise. Eaten by a tiger, he becomes a tiger. Women who die in child-bed become ghouls and haunt the tombs, their feet reversed, heels foremost. In the Mariannas, there is a heaven and a hell. Violent death leads to hell, natural death to paradise. These people were destined to be slaves from all eternity. In another region of Oceania, the fate of the soul is decided by the family of the deceased, who throw dice for it. Odd means annihilation, even eternal happiness. In Tahiti, the blind souls, on leaving the body, wander away to a plain where there are two stones. One, touched first, confers immortal life, the other eternal death. This is almost sublimely absurd. It is as grandiose and terrible as predestination. Saint Augustine placed the one in the night, before birth. The Tahitians situated the other in the shades, after death. Protestantism, to which those poor people have since surrendered, has not much changed their beliefs. Generally speaking, the greatest effort of a religious or philosophical innovator is to put at the end what was originally at the beginning, or vice versa.

By connecting itself with the idea of immortality, the idea of justice has, then, singularly disturbed its original character. It has even contaminated the idea of earthly immortality—the idea of glory.

II

How glory, first reserved for the kings and warriors sung by the poets, has come finally to be attributed to the poets themselves, even more than to the heroes of their poems, is an historic fact whose exact origin would be of little interest. It would be more curious to discover as a result of what change in the manners and customs, or through what enhancement of egoism and of vanity, the complicated idea of justice came to attach itself to the idea of the perennity of the name and of the work. At what epoch of Greek civilization, did an Athenian dramatist, whose play had been flouted by the public, have the boldness to appeal to posterity? Are any ancient texts known wherein such recriminations may be read? Sensibility has increased to such an extent that there exists to-day no scorned poetaster who does not dream of the justice of future generations. The exigi monumentum of Horace and Malherbe has become democratized; but how can we believe that the vanity of authors has ever had a beginning? The fact must be admitted, however, in order to keep within the logic of the successive developments of human character.

Literary glory was at first merely the sentiment of the future duration of the present reputation—a legitimate sentiment which accords fairly well with the facts; for absolute revivals are almost as rare as solid rehabilitations. To-day it is a scientific probability. Æschylus believed that the relation existing in his own lifetime between the Suppliants and public opinion would continue the same throughout the ages. Æschylus was right; but not if he cherished the same dream with regard to the Danaides and the Egyptians. Yet Pratinas saw himself, in the future, one of the rivals of Æschylus, and Pratinas is to-day but a word, scarcely a name. The idea of glory, even in its oldest and most legitimate form, would seem, therefore, to contain the idea of justice, at least by preterition, since its non-realization at once suggests to us the idea of injustice. But men of so ancient a civilization should not be made to reason in terms of our modern sensibility. Pratinas would, perhaps, have submitted to destiny. He would, perhaps, have called a fact, pure and simple, what we are pleased to name injustice.

The idea of justice, since it is subject, to the variations of sensibility, is of the most instable sort. Most of the facts that we class to-day in the category of injustice, were left by the Greeks in the category of destiny. For others, which we ditch under the name of misfortune, or of fatality, they strove to find a cure. In principle, when a people restricts the category "destiny" in favour of the category "injustice," the truth has begun to confess its decadence. The extreme state of sensibility to injustice is symbolized by the gag of Zaina, who breathed only through a veil, in order to destroy no life—a state of intellectual degradation towards which European humanity, with its mystic vegetarians, precursors of sentimental socialists, is also progressing to-day. Have we not already our "lower brothers," and are we not agreed to praise the machines that spare animals the exercise of their muscles? To weep over the slave who turns the wheel, or the poet who sings in the desert, is a sign of depravity; for the fact is that the slave who turns the wheel loves life more than he suffers from his labour, while the poet who croaks like a frog in his hole finds singing an agreeable physiological exercise.