Youth

Front matter

Glass _ Book

.Wis

BY

Book First. INHERITANCE

What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ?

Jesus.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — Shakespeare.

YOUTH.

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Chapter I. The Conquests Of The Century

Y\/E often see, toward the end of winter, the gardener * * full of anxious care walking among his espaliers and trellises. He notes the condition of the buds and the wood, and with a careful eye examines the mysterious coverings which the sap of spring will soon swell and burst. These walks, where anxiety is always mingled with hope, suggest to me by analogy another walk, more disquieting still and more interesting, — that which the thinker preoccupied with the future may take among youth. There, also, sleeps, veiled and yet apparent beneath the veil that covers it, the great question of to-morrow. It germinates and grows in the heart of youth ; it sets in ferment in their brain things more significant than those which the gardener tries to discover under the covering of his buds.

Always interesting and always worthy of the most sympathetic attention, youth should especially attract us at critical epochs when changes announce themselves in the mental attitude. Does it not seem that this should be the case at the end of the present century ? Doubtless it is a vulgar error to confound periods of human evolution with the arbitrary chronological divisions called centuries. To the centuries are attributed a youth and an old age ; one speaks of their dawn and decline. Nothing is further from the truth. Powerful movements have marked the end of some centuries ; others have begun in decay and senility. It is none the less true that there may be a coincidence between the end of an historic period and the end of a century. Such I believe to be the case at present. We have behind us a vast development, wherein can be noted, after the enthusiasms of youth and the virile efforts of a brilliant manhood, the hesitations and signs of lassitude common to old age. But as humanity renews itself unceasingly, and is reborn from its ashes, it is at the moment when old things have reached the maximum of decrepitude that new things come to life.

That a time like this we are passing through should be big with the problems of the future, no one can doubt. That these problems present themselves with more insistence to those entering on life than to those already engaged in its affairs or about to leave it, is evident. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to turn our thoughts to youth, both in its interest and our own.

What will it do ? How will it take its place in the world which its predecessors have bequeathed it ? What

THE CONQUESTS OF THE CENTURY. 15

are its perils, its hopes, its pressing duties ? Truly, here is what may excite the most legitimate curiosity.

That we may see clearly into these various questions, it is necessary first to take a sort of inventory, and to characterize briefly the inheritance which falls to our youth ; then to try to understand this youth itself, and some of the modes of thought that distinguish it. We will try, after that, to trace such an ideal scheme of life as shall inspire the flower of our youth for the grand mission imposed upon them, — to avail themselves of the good the departing century leaves them, while striving to fill up its gaps and rectify its errors.

It is always very difficult to unify and group under a single point of view the greatly divergent elements of human activity. But, in general, the salient point of a century is not hard to discover, for it is that characteristic which determines its physiognomy, its tendencies, its beauties, and its defects. If it were designated by a title, indelibly and peculiarly its own, the period which we are leaving could not be called otherwise than the age of inductive science. Knowledge has come little by little, and for the first time since the creation of man, to be the directing power. Though this may appear evident, it is not superfluous to affirm it, because of the superficial idea which is often held of the grand work of man and of that which it is the fashion to call progress. Humanity is commonly represented as marching along a route where each generation marks its stage. There is thus, except for the difference of pace, constant advance along the whole line. This conception is false and dangerous. Not only are there, in the advance of society, long halts and retrograde movements, but essential changes of direction. The ideal of certain epochs is perchance at others neglected and even trampled under foot ; and often these two epochs work together, each after its own fashion, for the accomplishment of historical ends. There are periods of creation and periods of destruction ; there are periods which are devoted to analysis and working in detail, others which are synthetical. These seem asleep; those are as impetuous as a torrent. Certain centuries are religious, poetic, artistic ; others commercial, industrial, warlike. They are also effeminate and dissolute, as they are energetic and virtuous. And all bring on the scene their especial characters; chosen sons, made in their image, and pass on in their turn honour and power to dreamers, diplomats, orators, the rash, the wise, fools, favourites, courtiers. But human evolution is so vast and so complicated that it never takes in everything at a time. It advances by successive moves in directions the most varied. Notwithstanding the wealth of its aspirations or its struggles to embrace all, each period of activity makes only its particular advance, to which everything is subordinated, one might even say sacrificed. It thus proves a kind of polarization of the entire work of humanity about a chosen centre. In the particular sphere which it delights to cultivate, a century surpasses, as a rule, those preceding it. But this does not imply that it surpasses or even equals them in other respects. On the contrary, the advantage which it gains by concentrating all its energies in one direction is offset by a loss in other departments.

THE CONQUESTS OF THE CENTURY. 17

Centuries, like individuals, have the defect of their qualities. There is here a general law which we must remember. Thanks to it, we understand better how, for example, the ancients, who were our masters in so many things, were only children in science compared to us. And the same law will explain to us, inversely, certain lamentable gaps in existing civilization. We, then, have made our advance in the direction of inductive science, not through mere fantasy, but driven by necessity. Under the slow wear of time old bases of society and antique creeds have decayed and fallen apart. It was imperative to strengthen them by grasping firmly the facts and ideas which entered into the building of this venerable edifice. That could only be done by going back over the humble path of experience. With a patience proof against all toil, man submitted and set himself to review the world in minute detail. Small and feeble in the face of a giant creation, ephemeral in the face of time without limit, he has not been rebuffed by the mediocrity of his methods nor the extent of the task. Simply, courageously, using his eyes to see, his fingers to touch, his heart to decide, he has set himself to the work. For he has found that the method which consists of deducing one fact from another, advancing from that which is near and known to that which is distant and unknown, is the most marvellous of discoveries. He could review through it, with tiny steps but sure, the most prodigious distances. Workers succeeded one another in their task, often obscure, where even to begin was to undergo a thousand privations. But when one dropped, another fell into step. How many labours have been forgotten, how many discoveries ignored ! Never has humanity appeared more admirable than on this steep road, where we see it advance wearied, wounded, but not rebuffed, holding in its hand the thread of gold which can guide it through the shadows to the dawn of truth.

Thanks to these enormous labours, we possess advantages which cannot be enumerated without emotion and thankfulness.

Astronomers have laid bare the immensity of the universe, and brought within our reach facts whose grandeur surpasses even the imagination. Geographers and explorers have made us know the globe we inhabit. Geologists have told us that it was born in fire, in ages far distant. The natural sciences have begun to instruct us in the numberless forms which life assumes in the vegetable and animal world, and have revealed to us an infinity more wonderful than that which astronomers have shown, — the infinity of small things. Physicians and physiologists have penetrated far in the delicate and difficult investigation of the human body, in order to teach us to know ourselves and to fight more effectively against suffering and disease. The mechanical arts and chemistry have accelerated intercourse, reduced distances, swelled a hundredfold industrial production, and increased the general welfare. Electricity, too, that last ally, which keeps its secret and serves us without our knowing why, has made an advance which seems to belong to the realm of the impossible.

THE CONQUESTS OF THE CENTURY. 19

Meanwhile historians have brought back the past, with a tireless activity, piece by piece, often forgetting to live in the present in order to bury themselves in the archives, the catacombs, the exhumed ruins of other days. They have set in their true light, and replaced in their historic frames the legends and the religious traditions of the fathers. They have corrected secular errors, avenged the martyrs, rehabilitated noble memories, scourged crimes, and above all set in their high and deserved place the weak and small, whose sufferings and rude labours have been too long neglected in favour of the wars and intrigues of the mighty of the earth ; — great services, too long to enumerate, but which every one can recall.

If we could bring back to us a man of the generations that have disappeared and take him among the marvels which our age owes to science, he would go from astonishment to astonishment, and would surely say to us: It was thus that we dreamed the age of gold. There is no question that the man of the present must find himself happier than he of old, and become better and more the master of himself. Knowing better the laws of Nature, he can conform his life to them. The diseases of yore are unknown to him, as well as its poverty and misery. He rules serenely over docile forces. That which would of old have destroyed him, to-day is his bondman. Fire is harnessed to his chariot, the lightning is his messenger. How this royalty should ennoble him! At the same time the history of the human race has given him great lessons in wisdom, in tolerance, in clemency. Among nations there should be good will. Justice should govern individuals and societies. Brought up from their youth in the belief of their high station, men should cause peace and fraternity to flourish on the earth which their ancestors soaked with blood. Happy the youth inheritors of such a world !

And this ancient would reason rightly. Why should facts contradict conclusions so natural? Here we are led to consider the reverse of the medal, or what the language of the law would call the inheritance tax.

Chapter II. The Losses Of The Century

ET us recall the law of which we have spoken. *~* Humanity does not go forward equally in all directions, but by leaps. In throwing herself so ardently in the direction of science, she has necessarily lost sight of other domains. Great territories, which are integral parts of man's patrimony, have been unconsciously neglected. Further, science itself has felt the reflex action of the law which raised it to the first rank. Too vast to be studied in all its ramifications, it has developed in certain branches in preference to others, and even to their exclusion. We see in the same way, often, one or more branches of a tree absorb nearly all the sap of the trunk, and leave to the others only a diminished sustenance. It was inevitable that in the gigantic undertaking of mastering the world in its smallest detail and sifting its facts and ideas, the elemental bases of all things must first be studied. The mechanical sciences and mathematics, the entire group of natural sciences, would naturally develop first. But as whenever we try to fathom the universe we come face to face with the infinite, so the sciences, at the outset so great in extent, soon seemed the whole of the world. After a time neither the strength nor the lifetime of investigators sufficed to consider them all. Each man, then, in this limitless field where the roads branch off unceasingly, entered on a single pathway. Investigators scattered, and more and more lost sight of one another. At the same time they all, as a consequence of living among elementary principles, ended by declaring as facts only tangible facts, and by giving the name of science to that which they call, by a title as false as significant, the positive sciences.

During all this, humanity continued to live and to need sustenance. She had followed these hardy pioneers of the remade world in their advance, and was, without suspecting it, far from her base of supplies. She had abandoned her old house before her new one was prepared. It was then that the consciousness of the brevity of life, the longing for something assured, and the need of interpreting life, gave birth prematurely to a philosophy which, seizing the actual results of scientific work, flattered itself that it could reconstruct with their aid the world and humanity, while deliberately ignoring all the accumulated wisdom and faith of the past. Alas ! the materials for this reconstruction, marvellous when we consider the labours of those who collected them, were none the less nearly useless in building a world. Could one explain the whole of life with what hardly sufficed to explain a grain of sand or a blade of grass ? Rashest of all attempts ! But the bold are always right, at least for a time. That time is passing to-day. We see that we have been too much in haste. After having begun to practise the inductive method, we have abandoned it ; we have also abandoned tradition, in which there is so much really worthy of preservation ; and we have made a prodigious leap into hypothesis, establishing conclusions which should have been reserved for the far-off future. In a word, we have thrown away our old bread to make new while the wheat is yet in the blade.

In thus reducing the real to its known proportions we have impoverished ourselves, and, what is truly remarkable, after having seen so many things of which our fathers were ignorant, we have narrowed our horizon. Man is belittled in his own eyes. This is the great, the negative result of the scientific development we have sketched.

But let us avoid being misunderstood. We are not of those who accuse certain men for the turn things have taken. No one can direct the life of society in its entirety. Each of us works in his own sphere ; the sum total does not depend on his will. We can only be expected to do what seems to us right. If the result does not answer expectation, it is not our affair. We accuse no one, then. Nevertheless, it is always useful to verify a fact and try to understand the situation, that we may draw lessons for the future. Still less do we accuse science. That would be folly and ingratitude. We desire only that science shall from day to day consider all facts worthy of respect, that it shall regain its equipoise and restore to spiritual realities the attention they deserve. We remember, too, that in the movement of science toward materialism, those who have gone the fastest have not been scholars. Many of them have carefully refrained from acceding to what may be called the scientific superstition. But if they have been reserved, others have spoken in their name. There are philosophers and writers who speculate with scientific data assumed en bloc, as one speculates with stocks on the bourse.

The belittling of man in his own eyes necessarily appears in all provinces of existence, betraying itself by a weakening of the spiritual life. By a sort of fatality, doctrines based on scientific materialism have invaded the arts and literature, and have spread from there into daily life, creating a lower materialism in which we seem engulfed at this end of the century. Egoism, in painful contradistinction, has profited most largely from the scientific conquests which sacrifice and devotion have won. In its hands they have swerved from their original purpose, and many have done more harm than good.

In pedagogy there are these other results, — utilitarian instruction, which is the breaking to harness of the bread-winner; and intellectualism, which places the centre of gravity of life in the domain of knowledge, as if that were all of man. Instruction has been considered a sufficient means of morality, and made unduly prominent at the expense of the development of character as well as discipline and physical health.

If the world of thought and feeling is cramped by abnormal scientific realism, it would seem, on the other hand, that the material world should have gained largely. There are, in fact, few scientific discoveries which have not been utilized for industrial purposes. And it is true that material good has greatly increased.

We are, as a general thing, better nourished, better lighted, better warmed, better and more quickly taught and transported, better cared for when we fall ill, better armed. Unhappily, there is a reverse to the medal. One of the darkest clouds of the times actually results from this very industrial progress. The methods of production, capital, and machinery have become so vast that they are beyond calculation and direction. Social results, completely unforeseen, often appear. Industrialism rises before us with all its consequences, — ■ industrialism, which crushes man beneath the machine, labour beneath capital, and which has become a source of suffering and hate as much through the physical and moral wretchedness of the labouring classes as through the uncertainty and excitement into which it has thrown commerce and manufactures.

Extreme centralization, which is another consequence of industrial and scientific development, has given us our monster cities, centres of artificial life, where is developed on the one hand pauperism, and on the other undue luxury, — dangerous neighbours, whose proximity is rendered more baleful by the pursuit of facile pleasures, and the creation of a crowd of artificial needs. All these causes taken together have undermined the public health.

In the field of international relations the struggle for existence, dowered by science with wonderfully perfect methods, has engendered militarism, an evil worse than war itself. One might define militarism as the scientific solution of the following problem : Given a union of all the forces of humanity, and all knowledge, as well as the fullest national resources, to find a method to neutralize them, and even to extract from them all the evil possible.

Our means of locomotion seem at the moment to serve less to draw nations together than to accentuate rivalries. The very accumulation of riches and industrial power has divided man from man, and increased the sharpness of competition and social distances ; the very perfection of the implements of war has made nations more distrustful. Their intercourse is rather that of inspection, suspicion, and injury, than a desire to know one another better, and to come together on the common ground of human interest.

The impression which we wish to create seems sufficiently prefaced by these considerations. Does it not seem, looking at our civilisation in a certain light, that a wicked genius has turned to evil all the new forces with which science has enriched mankind ?

How has this come about ? Can the scientific method be a bad one ? Have we gone astray in desiring to base life on experience instead of continuing to live in the old world of authority and dogma ? Not in the least. Our error has been in believing that knowledge and bread are sufficient for humanity, and allowing ourselves to slip from the scientific realism which includes man in the so-called positive knowledge, to a material realism which believes that to be fed, clothed, and housed is the sum of existence.

The best things can become injurious when they outstep their limits. Let us go somewhat into detail to explain ourselves better, for this is the key to the situation.

Every one knows that there have been at certain historical epochs exclusive powers, which have arrogated the right to direct and fashion humanity according to their own needs and often their own caprices. At one time it was religion, which, outstepping the bounds of its legitimate influence, made the arts, sciences, government, spring from itself. Now it is financial or mercantile power which seizes on society and reduces all human interests to a question of money. Again it is the military power which dictates, to the extent of driving into the background whatever weighs nothing in the balance against physical force. All these powers, legitimate in themselves because they represent a portion of human interest, are public evils when they become exclusive. Intended to serve the general good, they are its worst enemies. Each of them becomes a formidable organization, under which a monstrous collective egoism hides and defends itself, — an egoism in comparison with which that of the individual is as nothing. Such is the egoism of great institutions, of corporations, of castes and classes, of all clericalisms, and all the individual isms. We recognize in them actual combinations of individual interests which degenerate into attempts against society and end in paralyzing life about them. You remember the scribe at the time of Christ, the priest in the confessional at another epoch, and even according to their places and times the sophist of Athens, doctors, astrologers, men of the law, of war, and usurers. At certain periods of history it seems as if the earth had been created for the especial behoof of one or other of these personages, and the institutions they represent. They became the tyrants of mankind, its very shadow. Without them one could neither advance nor stop, live nor die. Everything belonged to them. Humanity was their possession, their sacrificial victim. Yet the starting-point of these tyrannical atrocities can always be traced to some original service to humanity. Why the decadence that has made them later on the very worst caricatures of what they were at first ? It is for this reason : They have sinned against the grand law which defines absolutely the limit of every human institution, — to serve, not enthrall, humanity.

I fear that this law has been seriously infringed as respects science. In fact, what do we now see ? The continuation of that admirable work which ought one day to represent the honest investigation by man of his impedimenta of facts and ideas ? That investigation doubtless continues, and no power can stop it. No; what we do see is the pretence of certain sciences to represent in themselves all human knowledge. And as outside of knowledge there is no longer in the eyes of science thus curtailed any means for man to come in contact with the realities, we see the pretence advanced by some that all reality and all life should be reduced to that which they have verified. Outside of this (and vast as it is, God knows how wretched is the domain compared with the infinite riches of life), there are only dreams and illusions. This is indeed too much ! It is no longer science, but scientific absolutism.

There would be no occasion to disturb ourselves if this pretence had not found a tremendous echo in the world. Let us quote the words of men of authority, that we may not be accused of exaggeration.

In a treatise which has had the widest circulation, Culturgescbicbte und Naturwissenschaft ', the Berlin professor Du Bois-Reymond said in 1877, and his words express the sentiment of a host of serious people who are imbued with the same prejudice : " The history of the natural sciences is the veritable history of mankind. What has been thus called until now is only a history of wars on the one hand, and the foolish conceptions of some civilized people on the other." From a man who more than any other has established and avowed the limitations of human knowledge, and who besides considers that commerce with classical antiquity is the only way to save us from a flat utilitarianism, such a statement is most significant. It is, moreover, a symptom. Already they no longer say : Science and philosophy ought to suffice for humanity. Philosophy has gone into the rubbish heap with religion and poetry. They say science ought to suffice for humanity. And leaping, in one gigantic bound beyond the position, already far enough advanced, of the German savant, one of our contemporary French scholars has left us six words, which will be to future generations evidence of the state of mind of a whole series of generations : " There is no longer any mystery " (Berthelot). Nothing equals the success which these ideas have had in every rank of society. They have spread through thousands of channels, among all classes. For many, for the immense majority, the outcome of science, duly proved and verified, is the belief that what we call the higher realities do not exist. Man is an animal like the other animals. It is easy to draw this practical conclusion.

At giant step the age has advanced in the path of realism, — scientific at first, practical next, — strewing its way heedlessly with all that constitutes the highest good of humanity. It has replaced the conception of a living world with that of a dead world. Everywhere the mechanical has superseded the spiritual. Materialistic science imputes spirituality neither to the world nor to mankind. For it there is no hereafter. The universe is a mighty piece of fireworks which is destined finally to be reduced to elementary atoms. These are the days when certain scholars speak as if they knew everything. As to the ignorant, they are more positive still ; and the greater number of our contemporaries are bitten by the stunted conception of a universe which furnishes no grounds for their beliefs, their conduct, nor even their feelings. What do things such as these amount to in the eyes of scientific realism ? Nothing. In such a world the lot of man is to descend to the grade of a machine, and to be, according to circumstances, a machine for work, for study, for enjoyment, for slaughter, a slave of lust, or food for the mitrailleuse.

And this is why, after having worked harder and investigated more thoroughly than any age, we are in danger of foundering in complete nothingness.

The hidden weakness, the flaw in the armour of this grand epoch, has been to forget that there are more things in heaven and earth than the positive sciences, or even all human knowledge, can prove. Our works have grown greater ; we have grown smaller. Man is lessened in his own eyes, in his dignity, and in his aspirations. The crime of high treason against humanity is at the bottom of all the sufferings of our times. Civilization rests on man. Remove man and all the immense machinery is thrown out of gear. It is because its basis, man, is weak that our civilization threatens to crumble about our heads.

And this is not the most striking feature in the picture of the inheritance which our children will receive. That which is more striking still, but which will be its salvation if our successors understand it, is that the world in which we live is thoroughly contradictory. We will try to show how.

Chapter III. The Contradictions Of The Century

TTHE materialistic conception of the world, and such * portions of our civilization as are the temporary result of it, seem to us antagonistic to the modern spirit at every point. The modern spirit represents the epitomized inheritance of the ages. The title " modern " indicates only its tendency and methods, not its constituent parts, for they are drawn from every source. It can be well defined in the beautiful words of Terence : Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto. The modern spirit is the sum total, condensed, of the best which humanity has drawn from all the mighty labours and all the sufferings of the past. It is, in the domain of thought, a broad outlook over all things, a premeditation to exclude nothing, to see clearly and to find the truth as it is, without any reservation; in a word, the true scientific spirit.

In the domain of the affections, it is a kindly disposition, resolute to despise no one, to defraud no one, to respect in especial the weak, and to have pity on all who suffer. It is, above all, the glorification of labour as the mighty power which makes men free and good.

In politics, the modern spirit is the democratic spirit in its highest sense. It recognizes, as the regulators of society, right, law, justice, and joint responsibility.