Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

There is much talk, in certain political circles, of integral education. This means, doubtless, that everybody should be taught everything—also, that a vague universal notion would be a great benefit, a great comfort for any intelligence whatsoever; but, in this reasoning, there is a confusion between matter and form. The intelligence, which has a general and common form, has also a particular form for each individual. Just as there are several memories, so there are several intelligences; and each of these intelligences, modified by its own physiology, determines the individual intellect. Far from its being a good thing to teach everybody everything, it seems clear that a given intelligence can, without danger to its very structure, receive only those kinds of notions which enter it without effort. If we were accustomed to attach to words only those relative meanings they admit of, integral education would signify the sort of education compatible with the unknown morphology of a brain. In the majority of cases the quantity of this education would amount to nothing, since most intelligences cannot be cultivated.

At least by the methods at present employed, which may be summed up in a single word—abstraction. It has come to be admitted in teaching circles that life can be known only as speech. Whether the subject be poetry or geography, the method is the same—a dissertation which sums up the subject and pretends to represent it. Education has at length become a methodical catalogue of words, and classification takes the place of knowledge.

The most active, intelligent man can acquire only a very small number of direct, precise notions. These are, however, the only ones of any real depth. Teaching gives nothing but education. Life gives knowledge. Education has at least this advantage, that it is generalized, sublimated knowledge and thus capable of containing, in small bulk, a great quantity of notions; but, in the majority of minds, this too condensed food remains inert and fails to ferment. What is called general culture is usually nothing but a collection of purely abstract mnemonic acquisitions which the intelligence is incapable of projecting upon the plane of reality. Without a very lively and universally active imagination, notions confided to the memory dry up in a dead soil. Water and sun are required to soften and ripen the sprouting seed.

It is better to know nothing than to know badly, or little, which is the same thing. But do we know what ignorance is? So many things have to be learned in order to appreciate and understand it! Those who might enjoy ignorance, since they possess it, are under too many illusions concerning themselves to find any frank refreshment in it; and those who would be glad to do so, have left their first innocence too far behind them. There have been moments of civilization when men knew everything. It was not much. Was it much less than all the science of to-day? This relativity may well make us reflect upon the value of education. It will aid us also to indicate its true character. Education is never other than relative. It ought, then, to be practical.

M. Barrès, in his last novel,[2] makes a deputy of Burdeau's type say: "Virtue, like patriotism, is a dangerous element to arouse in the masses." To these two abstractions should, perhaps, be added all the others, in order to decree a general ostracism against every idea that has not first been defined. And this would not mean the proscription of virtues or of patriotic sentiments, but simply this, that nothing is worse for the health of an average intelligence than playing with abstract words—than that false verbal science which is at once found inapplicable on entering real life. It is not a matter of being virtuous; how realize a word which is the synthesis of several contradictory ideals? It is a matter of accommodating one's nature to the vital conditions and moral traditions of his environment. It is not a matter of being patriotic. It is a matter of defending, against strange beasts, the purity of the spring where one drinks. It is not a matter of knowing the abstract principle in which the broad river of general ideas may find its source. It is a matter of making life at once an act of faith and an act of prudence. It is a matter first and foremost of preserving enough simplicity to breathe joyfully the social air, and enough suppleness to obey, without cowardice, the elementary laws of life.

Life is a series of sensations bound together by states of consciousness. Unless your organism is such that the abstract notion redescends towards the senses the moment it has been understood; unless the word Beauty gives you a visual sensation; unless handling ideas gives you a physical pleasure, almost like caressing a shoulder or a fabric, let ideas alone. When a miller has no grist, he shuts his sluices and sleeps, or goes and takes a walk. He never dreams of running his mill when it is empty, and wearing out his stones grinding air. Education is often nothing but the wind raised by the whirling of the bolts, and felt as words.

Teaching, from top to bottom—from the official to the popular universities, from the village school to the École Normale—is little else than a phrase-factory. The most valuable of all is the primary school, where one learns to read and write—acquisitions, not of a science, but of a new sense. If there were cut from the programme of the rest everything useless—everything inapplicable to life or to some profession or trade—scarcely enough would be left for eighteen months' schooling.

The greater part of the people still escape the tortures of listening to gentlemen who recite books. The children of the poor, freed from the scholastic prison, learn a trade, which is an enhancement of one's self, and begin to live at an age when their rich brothers still spend their time handling words which correspond to nothing real—tools which sculpture the eternal void.[3] This is about to be remedied, and here is the subject of a night lecture in a people's university: "The Development of the Idea of Justice in Antiquity." Even supposing—what is little likely—that the professor said nothing on this subject that could not be absorbed by a healthy intelligence, of what use could such a discourse possibly be to a popular audience, and what could such an audience derive from it applicable to its own humble existence? Less, assuredly, than from the old-fashioned sermons which were not afraid to flout its vices and to play upon its cowardice to keep it from low pleasures. But the clergy of the lay religion is grave and disdainful of facts. Souls speak to souls. The ideal descends upon the people. The first Christians at least met both to pray and to eat in fraternal union. After the repast, some arose to utter prophecies. The modern prophets live only on abstractions, and they gladly share this economical and ridiculous food with their brethren.

The man who has slowly acquired a science, has, aside from the social advantages which it offers him, conferred, by that very fact, a special force and agility upon his organs of attention. He possesses not only the desired science, but a whole hunting outfit in good condition, and all ready for new quarry. When he has carefully and patiently acquired a foreign language, he can afterwards, with far less effort, master the other languages of the same family. But, if he has had recourse to some time-saving method, the acquisition no longer possesses its proper value, and may even deteriorate more or less rapidly. Water, boiled very quickly, grows cold equally fast—a fact ignored by the manufacturer who had set up public boilers. By the time it had crossed the street, the water was as cold as if it had come from a cool spring. It is for this same reason that quick teaching by the lecture system is so particularly useless. The listener learns to believe and not to reason, which would still be a way of acting and of living.

Educational baggage is composed almost entirely of beliefs. Literature and science are taught like a catechism. Life is the school of prudent doubt. The school is a pretentious church. Every professor is equipped with an arsenal of aphorisms. The youth who refuses to let himself be made a target is despised. The inversion of logical values is carried to the point where certain intellectual acts—resistance to scientific faith, Cartesian reserve—are considered signs of unintelligence.