IX. De la liberté des arts qui travaillent à l'éducation de nos facultés intellectuelles.

CHAP. 19: IX. On the liberty of the arts that work on the education of our intellectual faculties.

§ 1. What is the secret force that makes us capable of feeling, perceiving, comparing, judging, reasoning, remembering? How can these immaterial functions be accomplished through the intermediary of material organs? Do these organs act by themselves, or do they yield to the impulse of a particular force distinct from them? Is intelligence, like life, only a way of being of matter; must we say, with certain physiologists, that the brain thinks, as they say the stomach digests, because such is the law of its organization, because that is in its nature: or rather, with the psychologists, must we admit that, by themselves, the encephalic organs are destitute of all force, and that there exists, under the name of mind or soul, a being of a particular nature of which they are only the instruments? This is a problem that all our natural means of investigation leave us powerless to resolve; but whose solution, fortunately, we have no need to give here.

Whatever the case may be, in effect, with the hypothesis of the materialists or that of the spiritualists; whether the nervous system executes its functions by virtue of a force proper to it, or whether it is the passive instrument of an immaterial agent from which it receives its impulse: it is always the case that it is absolutely impossible for us to feel without the help of the nerves; that our intelligence performs no operation except through the intermediary of the brain; that it appears to be proportioned in all individuals to the greater or lesser perfection of this apparatus; that it develops with it; that it is deranged when it is altered; that it is weakened when it degrades; that everything that influences the brain acts on the intelligence; that everything that troubles it troubles the intelligence; that it slumbers when it sleeps; that it reasons unsoundly when it is drunk; that it suddenly ceases to act when, by compressing it, one neutralizes its action; that it revives and is reborn as soon as the compression ceases; finally, that it depends on it for all its manifestations, for all its acts, and that it follows it invariably in all its variations [^534] .

The only means we have of perfecting the intelligence, therefore, is to act on the instruments through the intermediary of which the intelligence is exercised; and it is properly to this that the high industries of which the intelligence is the object are devoted; it is in this that their nature consists. They differ from those that work on the body of man only in this respect, that they are exercised on different apparatuses; that the former act above all on the organs of locomotion, while the latter act on the organ that gives them movement, on the brain. For the rest, they act on the brain in absolutely the same way that gymnastics acts on the limbs, that is to say, by exercising it, by making it act: it is a veritable cerebral gymnastics.

The brain, in effect, is as susceptible to education as all the organs of the body over which its empire extends, as the organ of the voice, as the fingers of the hand. Exercise modifies it in the most profound manner. It makes acts easy for it that it at first executed only with extreme difficulty. It causes it to acquire suppleness, dexterity, strength, agility, just like the organs of the body.

In truth, the work of the brain, and in general of the nervous system, does not strike the eye like that of the muscles; but, although it is in no way apparent, this work is no less real. It is so indispensable to make the brain act in order to develop its forces, that a teacher who confined himself to perorating before his pupils, and who let them passively receive his ideas, without ever obliging them to render them, to reproduce them, whatever force and order he might otherwise put into his deductions, would form their intelligence only very imperfectly. Such a teacher would resemble the dance master who, to instruct his pupils, confined himself to breaking down each of his steps before their eyes, and to showing them the chain of elementary movements of which they were formed, but without ever having them repeat any of them. Does one not feel that such a master would have to produce rather clumsy pupils? Well! it would be absolutely the same for the teacher who confined himself to producing before his disciples the series of cerebral acts to which he would want to form their encephalic organs.

Just as the dance master, to make good pupils, is obliged to train their limbs in the varied movements of which his art is composed, so the teacher is obliged to accustom the organs of their intelligence to the sequence of intellectual acts of which each of the sciences he teaches them is formed, to make these acts and their sequence familiar to them, to have them repeat them until they execute them, like him, without effort and without fatigue [^535] .

What is called the progress of ideas, the progress of sciences, is nothing other, if I am not mistaken, than the progress of the education of the brain, than the greater aptitude that the organs of human intelligence acquire for fulfilling the functions proper to them. A science, considered in the individual who possesses it, is only the aptitude of his brain to pass through a certain filiation of ideas, just as the tune that this individual knows how to sing is only the aptitude of his larynx to modulate a certain sequence of sounds under the direction of his brain; just as the dance he has learned is only the aptitude of the muscles of his feet and legs to execute, always under the direction of his brain, a certain series of movements. The science is all the more perfect, as the brain that possesses it, that is to say, that is in a state to render it, can observe in this work an order more in conformity with its own nature and with that of the things it reflects, and as it is more accustomed, more practiced in this exercise.

Once again, the characteristic of the industries that make the education and perfections of the intelligence their object is therefore to act on the material instruments through the intermediary of which the intelligence executes its functions, and to perfect these instruments by the same means as all our other faculties, that is to say, by action, by exercise.

§ 2. I do not have to examine here what part of the encephalic organs is more specially assigned to the functions of our faculty of knowing. Are there in the brain organs for science, others for imagination, others for the passions, etc.? Are knowing, imagining, becoming passionate, different functions of the same organ, or does there exist a particular order of organs for each of these orders of faculties; an order of organs for positive knowledge, and a particular organ for each branch of knowledge; an order of organs for the arts of the imagination, and a particular organ for each of the fine arts; an order of organs for affections of every kind, and a particular organ for each of our inclinations?

One can consult on this question, without however promising to find very sure lights in them, the latest works of physiology. I will content myself with observing, without affirming anything about the plurality of organs, that it appears impossible to deny the plurality of faculties; that the human mind does not act, when it observes and reasons, as when it feeds on fantastic images or is moved by some passion; nor when it gives itself over to its imagination and its passions, as when it regulates and masters them; that consequently the arts that are occupied with the culture of the human understanding can consider it under three great aspects, or, if you will, that it can be subjected to the action of three great classes of industries:

Those that cultivate its faculty of knowing;

Those that take charge of the maintenance of its imagination and its affections;

Those, finally, that work on the formation of its moral habits.

I will confine myself, in this chapter, to speaking of those that are exercised on the intelligence properly so-called, that is to say, on our faculty of knowing.

§ 3. I do not need to say to what point these latter industries are important. It is enough, to understand it, to consider that our external organs execute absolutely nothing except by the impulse and under the direction of our intellectual faculties. These faculties are the base and the soul of all the arts. The arts never do anything but render what thought has conceived. Song, dance, the work of the hands, that of machines, from the simplest to the most complicated, from the weakest to the most powerful, are only diverse manifestations of diverse movements that first took place in the brain and in the nerves. Our limbs, in the midst of their most rapid evolutions, do not make a movement that does not result from a particular impulse of the brain, that is not the distinct expression of a movement of another nature executed first in the nervous system.

Surely it is not enough to have a thought to be in a state to produce it. If it is difficult to conceive, it is scarcely less difficult to express. We know what pains we need to take to accustom our external senses to render in a suitable manner the internal movements of the soul, or rather the movements of the delicate and mobile organ by means of which the soul acts. But it is above all the education of this organ that matters: the good use of all the rest depends on it.

The human mind is the prime mover of the arts that man practices. It is the force that gives the impulse to all the others. This force is susceptible of a prodigious extension, and when it is developed in a direction in conformity with the arts that society exercises, it produces results that are astonishing. This is what has been remarked, at all the epochs when the education of the intelligence has been appropriate to the nature of the arts that were most in honor, even before the culture of the mind had made very considerable progress. If, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, for example, the professional dominators showed themselves so fit for war, it is because all their ideas related to the exercise of the military art, as did all their actions, and because there was perfect accord between the education of their mind and that of their limbs.

It is unfortunately not the same, in the epoch of transition in which we live. The intellectual education of society has almost no relation to the arts that society cultivates. While the great mass of men by whom these arts are exercised receives no intellectual culture, those whose mind is more cared for learn almost nothing of what they would need to know to practice them with intelligence and with force. The greatest part of intellectual education, in the entire European race, is devoted to teaching two dead languages, and to forming literary artists in the taste of the Greeks and Romans.

I certainly do not wish to deny that the study of languages is a good thing. I will not even disagree that the understanding of dead languages, and notably that of Greek and Latin, presents a certain degree of utility. Any man who, to the knowledge of the art he exercises, wishes to join that of the history of that art, has without contradiction some interest in knowing what was written about it by two peoples among whom most of the arts originated, among whom above all the fine arts, and notably poetry and eloquence, were cultivated with great distinction; and although there exist translations of their works, it is surely not a matter of indifference for him to be able to make his observations and his research in the original authors.

But, it must be said, beyond this interest, almost entirely one of erudition, it appears difficult to conceive what advantage the knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages can offer. Considered as a direct means of instruction, it is, if I am not mistaken, of a much inferior interest to that of the languages we speak. There are several of the living languages of Europe in which one finds infinitely more to read than in Latin and in Greek. All the literary riches of one or the other of these two languages can be contained in some fifty volumes, whereas there are thousands of good works to read in French, English, Italian, German. We can draw from these works knowledge that is, in general, much surer, much more extensive, and above all much better suited to our morals, our tastes, our arts, than from Greek and Latin books. The languages in which these same works are written can be read and spoken, whereas Latin and Greek can only be read. The first of these languages are those of living nations with which we are perpetually in relation for business or pleasure, whereas the second are those of two peoples who have disappeared forever from the world stage. We cannot make love in Greek, nor speak of business in Latin. In whatever country we go, these languages could be of no resource to us; and when we find ourselves among peoples whose idiom we do not understand, among whom we are, in a way, deaf and mute, and where one can make sport of us with impunity, it is, as has been said, a singular way of consoling ourselves for this humiliating position, to think that we can translate an eclogue by Virgil, or scan, for better or worse, an ode by Horace [^536] . Even if one were to make the study of languages the essential object of education, the dead languages would therefore not be those that one should preferably study. The knowledge of these languages appears to be, in all respects, infinitely less advantageous than that of the living languages.

But, if it seems little sensible to prefer the study of the former to that of the latter, it is perhaps still less reasonable to make the teaching of languages, in general, the fundamental object of education.

The teaching of languages, as it is universally practiced, is, without contradiction, one of the most imperfect means that can be employed to form the minds of men. Besides the fact that logic has rarely presided over their formation, that their syntax, their orthography, their pronunciation, their prosody are full of irregularities and inconsistencies, the manner in which they are taught adds to the vices proper to them, and contributes to making this study a still more imperfect means of exercising and developing the mind. It is enough to open the first grammar for the use of our colleges to recognize that there is perhaps no kind of elementary book in which more vicious explanations are given of what is claimed to be taught, and where the minds of the pupils are more accustomed to be satisfied with poor reasoning. This kind of teaching therefore has, up to a certain point, the defect of warping the intelligence, and this disadvantage, which is already very grave, is nevertheless not the only one nor perhaps the greatest.

[^534]: See, on this subject, the works of M. Broussais, and especially his treatise De l'Irritation et de la Folie. [^535]: See my work entitled De l'Enseignement dans ses rapports avec l'industrie. [^536]: See, on this subject, the Edinburgh Review, No. 88.In a system of instruction where one would pride oneself on logic, and where one had at heart the formation of good minds, it seems that one would think of giving ideas before teaching how to render them, and that one would first seek to make men who are instructed and enlightened, reserving the work of forming writers for later. It is not so in the system that considers the study of languages as the natural object of education and the best means of developing intelligences. In this system, in effect, one strives to form the style of young people before one has thought of teaching them anything, before they have in reality learned anything, before they know any science, before they have experienced any passion, and at an age when they can have no experience of men, of things, or of affairs. Thus, while the manner in which the rules of language are explained to them tends to make them into false minds, the habit they are made to contract of writing before they have ideas tends to make them into vain minds, empty talkers, men whose most natural disposition will be to speak before having learned, and who, all their lives, will consider the art of lining up words and stringing together sentences as the first of all merits. Let us agree, then, that the teaching of languages, as we see it practiced in the colleges, is an exercise little suited to giving the mind rectitude and force, and to forming it well in general.

It must be added that this exercise also has the disadvantage of not making the mind fit for any particular art. It is surely not doubtful that the capacity to understand, speak, and write a language is a precious thing; it is all the more so as this language is that of a more cultivated people, as it is more widespread, as one has more occasions to make use of it. But in the end, the language that one has the most interest in knowing, even when one possesses it best, can only be considered as a means, as the means of entering into relation with the men who speak it, or with the books that these men have written. Languages, in general, are less a piece of knowledge than one of the instruments by means of which all knowledge is acquired; and it is clear that one does not acquire knowledge so long as one is only putting oneself in possession of the instrument.

How unreasonable, then, is a system of instruction that consecrates the first eighteen or twenty years of the short duration of human life—far more time than the common run of men can grant to the entire education of their mind, far more even than would be needed, in a better system, to prepare for the most elevated professions—solely to learning two languages. And it is precisely to learning those that it is least important to know, those that professional scholars almost alone have an interest in knowing; two languages that are no longer spoken, in which there is much less to read than in several of those that are spoken, and of which all the good works have been translated into the languages we speak. These are two languages that are, moreover, learned rather poorly, that almost everyone forgets after having learned them, and whose study—which its lack of object, its duration, and the vice of the methods employed tend to make so repellent—often has no other result than to cause an aversion to every kind of intellectual work. What an extravagance it is to give to the study of these languages such a madly exaggerated importance; to make it, if not the sole object, at least the most fundamental and considerable object of education; to want not only that one understand Latin, but that one be in a state to speak it, to write it, to write it in verse as well as in prose! What could be more inconsistent than to prepare men for the most diverse professions by a single kind of work, and by a work that has no very direct relation with any of these professions! We have in India, observes an English writer, one hundred thousand of our compatriots who prepared for this voyage by writing barbarous verses about Apollo, Mars, and Mercury, and who for the rest had learned none of the languages spoken by the one hundred million individuals over whom their domination is exercised [^537]. We could say likewise that we have in our fields, in our workshops, in our counting-houses, in our offices, in our laboratories, thousands of individuals who have prepared for the practice of agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, and a multitude of other professions, by employing their youth in making translations and compositions, or in stringing together dactyls and spondees in a certain order.

Literary exercises in Greek and Latin are not a suitable preparation for any kind of industry, perhaps not even for the literary industries, to which, however, these exercises seem to serve more naturally as a preparation. I will not examine whether the knowledge of the literatures of antiquity has been favorable or contrary to modern literatures. That is a question on which there can be much to say and to contest. But what seems less contestable is that we do not learn to write our own language by writing Latin verses or Greek compositions.

What is also less contestable is that the long years we spend occupying ourselves with grammar, syntax, speeches, verses, forms of style, and figures of rhetoric, are lost years for the practical study of almost all the arts, as for the acquisition of every kind of knowledge that their exercise demands, and that on leaving college at twenty we are still good for nothing, unless it be perhaps to produce pure literature, that is to say, literature without ideas.

It thus happens that there is not the slightest connection between what we learn as children and what we must do as men, between the studies of adolescence and the professions of manhood. We are destined for the most diverse professions, and the common education tends to make of us only men of letters; and men of letters, at that, in literatures dead for fifteen or twenty centuries, which have absolutely ceased to be the expression of society; so that this entirely literary education does not even seem fit to form men of letters, I mean men skilled in rendering in written speech the ideas and impressions of their time.

Thus the faculties of which we would have the greatest need, we leave uncultivated; we develop others from which we can draw no benefit; we do so well that our intellectual education, instead of preparing us for the practice of the profession we will one day exercise, most often tends only to distract us from it, to make us less capable of exercising it, and we weaken ourselves precisely by the means that should most contribute to the increase of our strength.

 

But one must be careful not to judge what the arts charged with the culture of our understanding would be in a state to do by what they do. If the systems of instruction in force are far from being the most proper to form the intelligence, it is not doubtful that better-conceived systems could better develop its forces in general, and develop them in particular in a direction more in conformity with the needs of present society.

Surely not everything in the received system should be blamed. I agree that, in the number of things that children and adolescents are made to learn, there are some whose utility is not doubtful. I regard as indispensable, specifically, all that has for its object to familiarize them with the practical knowledge of language, with the customary art of speech, with the habit of speaking, of writing, and even of rendering their thought in writing. Languages are not only means of communication, but also means of acquiring ideas; they are indispensable instruments for the formation of the intelligence. It is no more possible to think without the help of words than to calculate without the help of numbers. So long as our ideas are not clothed in the forms of language, they are confused and fleeting. We need to write them down to grasp them, to become masters of them. The more we are practiced in this work, the more we have the habit of formulating, of rendering our acquired ideas in writing, the easier it is for us to acquire new ideas.

It is therefore not doubtful that one of the most fundamental needs of the education of the mind is to form us in the written and spoken use of speech.

But, for the very reason that we need language to think, it is clear first that the language we should above all be taught is the one in which we think, the one we habitually use, and not languages that we will never have occasion to use. Next, for the very reason that language serves us to acquire new ideas only by expressing acquired ideas, it is clear that the study of language should not precede the acquisition of ideas, but follow it, or better still, accompany it.

The good course would be to learn, and, as one acquired ideas, to practice empirically expressing them, to make them surer, more precise, more available by formulating them, and thereby to give oneself the means to extend one's knowledge still further. One can scarcely conceive the possibility of separating the study of things from that of the signs destined to express them; but it is particularly absurd to want to begin with the study of signs, and grammar, which is the first thing one strives to teach us, is perhaps the last that we should study.

The essential thing is to study things, always things, and to use language only to facilitate this work, to practice the use of words while learning ideas. It is only by familiarizing ourselves with things, by observing them attentively in themselves and in their action, by looking well at what they are and the laws they follow, that we can prepare ourselves in a suitable manner for the arts we are destined to practice.

Every art is but the application to a certain work of a certain body of knowledge. To be in a state to exercise it, the first thing we need is to be formed for this work; the second, to acquire this knowledge.

With what power of action would a people not be endowed, among whom men, instead of fruitlessly employing all their youth in useless studies, would set themselves early to seeing done and to doing themselves the thing for which they felt the most attraction; where to these practical exercises would soon be joined studies of theory, proper to enlighten them and make them easier; where they would be taught the elements of the sciences that would be most directly connected to the practice of their art; where they would be exercised above all in making useful applications of this knowledge to their work; where care would be taken to form them at the same time in the moral habits that the exercise of their profession would demand; where, finally and after having instructed them in all that could make its practice easier and more fruitful, they would be shown the place it occupies in society, the other labors to which it is linked, the manner in which all labors are connected, and the general conditions of their common prosperity!

Unfortunately, things are far from being arranged in society to thus prepare men for the affairs of life, to develop their intelligence in the direction of the functions they will have to fulfill or the labors they will have to do. Society not yet having a clearly determined character, not being organized in the interest of the useful professions, it is difficult for education to be well-appropriated to these professions. But, the more the future of society reveals itself to it, the more it understands its true vocation, the more it sees that its destiny is to prosper through a strong and learned practice of all the peaceful arts, the more it will feel the need to give to those arts whose special object is the culture of the understanding a direction better accommodated to the needs of all the others, the more it will feel that an enlightened education of the intelligence is the most fundamental condition for the success of all the arts.

 

The arts that are occupied with the education of the mind are indispensable to the success of the others, not only because they enlighten their practice, but also because they put one in moral dispositions more favorable to their progress. The more instruction is mixed with the practice of any art, the more one exercises it with elevation, with disinterestedness, with affection; the more one cultivates it for its own sake; the more one is occupied with its progress; one is less sensitive to the profits one makes as a speculator; one is more so to the successes obtained as an artist; one is touched by one's gains, less because they are a means of well-being, than because they bear witness to the power one exercises, because they are a means of acquiring a greater power; and, instead of dissipating one's profits in the enjoyments of luxury, as industrious people whose minds are little cultivated ordinarily do, one employs the best part of them in usefully extending one's enterprises, in perfecting one's processes, and in general in becoming more powerful in one's profession, in obtaining more considerable results in it.

Besides, even if the scientific industries did not have the virtue of making us more fit, in a multitude of respects, for the exercise of all the others, they would still be, for their own sake and for the immediate advantages they procure, worthy of inspiring in us the highest consideration. We find in learning a pleasure detached from any other interest than the pleasure of learning itself. A discovery charms us before we know what use it may be to us, and by the sole fact that it satisfies our desire to know, that it makes our mind act, that it gives it the sentiment of its force, that it contributes more or less to increasing it.

We love everything that has the effect of increasing our faculties, whatever they may be, but especially our mental faculties. If we are happy when we add to the vigor or skill of our body, we are much more so when we develop the powers of our mind. The culture of the intelligence has always been regarded as one of the noblest and sweetest occupations of man. What voluptuary is there whose enjoyments approach those of the studious man who fruitfully cultivates his understanding, who feels his intellectual forces increase, who penetrates each day a little further into the knowledge of the sensible world or that of the moral world? What sensual pleasure would have for him the divine charm of these discoveries? Who would not rather be in the place of Newton, at the moment when his powerful intelligence rises from the fall of an apple to the knowledge of universal gravitation, than in that of the epicurean who savors a delicate dish, or who discovers the means of giving himself some new sensation?

At the same time that the pleasures of the mind are purer and more elevated than those of the senses, they also appear more durable and are above all less expensive. The intelligence does not become jaded as quickly as the senses over the enjoyments it experiences: consequently, it does not have as frequent a need to renew them. Our senses are naturally insatiable. Scarcely have they tasted a pleasure than they tire of it and solicit a new one. If one yields in the least to their importunities, they increase, and the most considerable fortune is soon too small to suffice for all their fantasies. They are ruinous both because they destroy a multitude of things that must be ceaselessly renewed, and because they demand that these things be ever more refined and more varied. Doubtless, the curiosity of the mind is not easy to satisfy. The mind also aspires, like the senses, to multiply, to extend, to vary its pleasures. But, besides the fact that it enjoys its impressions longer, it is easier to procure new ones for it; little is needed to set it in action; the materials and instruments of its work and its enjoyments are comparatively inexpensive, and it is rare to see men ruined for having granted too much to their intelligence, while the world is full of people who have fallen into misery for not having known how to resist the demands of their senses.I add that by granting much to one's senses, one compromises one's health no less than one's fortune; one runs the risk of becoming brutish, of degrading oneself, and there are not, by a long shot, the same disadvantages in yielding to the solicitations of one's intellectual faculties. Surely these faculties must also be managed: one must not abuse any of them. If one must guard against saying with Rousseau that the man who meditates is a depraved animal, it is certain that the man who did nothing but meditate would harm, in several respects, the perfection of his nature. An immoderate exercise of our rational faculties can harm all our faculties at once, those of the body and those of the soul. It is notably difficult to exercise one's faculty of knowing a great deal without diminishing a little one's faculty of imagining and feeling. If it rarely happens that poets are distinguished by a great force of reason and logic, it is not common for philosophers to sin by an excess of imagination and sensibility. But, while recognizing that the pleasures of the intelligence can also have their disadvantages, one must agree that it is less easy and less common to abuse them than physical enjoyments, and that the abuse of them, besides, does not appear nearly as vexatious.

Finally, these pleasures also have this advantage, that they can take the place, up to a certain point, of those that fortune gives. Each man enjoys above all through those of his faculties that he has particularly exercised. The more one has cultivated one's mind, the less one seeks to be happy through one's senses. The culture of the intelligence simplifies needs, diminishes the eagerness for gain, and removes from material wealth a part of its importance.

It is, moreover, when it becomes a little general, extremely favorable to equality; it destroys in the lower classes what makes them most invincibly repulsed by the elevated classes, namely, coarseness, roughness; it elevates men by polishing them; it elevates them again by adding to their forces; for, if fortune is a power, spirit is certainly one as well. Nothing, in a word, seems so proper as the culture of the mind to truly make inequality disappear from among men.

At the same time that it polishes their morals, it softens them. They lived at first under the empire of the imagination and ardent passions: study has gradually tempered this heat of the blood; it has dissipated illusions, cooled enthusiasm, extinguished fanaticism, and put an end, by that alone, to a multitude of hideous disorders and crimes, each more atrocious than the last. Even if the patient culture of the understanding had done nothing other than dampen that acrid heat of the imagination and passions which for a long time rendered them so destructive, one could say that it has powerfully contributed to the civilization and salvation of the human race.

One sees, therefore, that the industries that are occupied with the education of the intelligence, already very important in the sense that they develop an order of means indispensable to the exercise of all the arts, are so again in this respect, that the means they create are in themselves infinitely precious products, products destined to satisfy one of the most imperious needs of our nature, and which are for us an inexhaustible source of advantages and pleasures.

But how do these noble industries become powerful, and what application is there to be made here of the general principles that we have not ceased to present, in the course of this work, as the source of all force and all liberty? This is what remains for me to make known.

§ 4. I ask that one not be astonished if I again consider here the talent for business, that is to say, the talent for judging what it is suitable to undertake and for conducting one's enterprises with skill, as the first element of power. It is not enough to propose a laudable goal, to think of propagating good ideas; one must also be able to promise oneself that these ideas will find minds disposed to receive them, that there will be consumers of the intellectual product one proposes to disseminate.

Before founding a school, before undertaking a journal, before publishing any work whatsoever, one must always ask oneself if the action one wishes to exercise on intelligences responds to a felt need, and when one has proof that this need exists, if it is not already satisfied, or if one has the means to satisfy it better. Even if one counted one's own interest for nothing, if one had no other goal than to be useful, one must succeed; one must create a school that people will attend, a journal that has subscribers, a work that the public will want to read, and for that one must enter into the tastes of the public.

I am surely not saying that one must take counsel from its errors and speculate on the flaws of its intelligence: even if one were not led by honor to disseminate only sound instruction, one ought to be so in the well-understood interest of one's art; but I say that, to find a market for such instruction, one must assort it carefully with the taste of the public to whom one offers it; I say that, to lead this public to better ideas, one must start from the good ideas it has, and that the teacher who knows how to accommodate himself to the state of its intelligence, and to avoid equally clashing with it and getting too far ahead of it, is at once the one who serves it best and the one who does the best business.

I can very well conceive that a man who is very far ahead of common ideas does not always have the patience to wait, before publishing his discoveries, for the great number to be in a state to profit from them; but, for the very reason that he does not work for the great number, he cannot reasonably hope that the great number will seek out his writings, and he must necessarily content himself with the suffrages of cultivated minds and elite intellects to whom his productions are more particularly addressed. Thus, while recognizing that a teacher, a writer, a journalist, even considering only the interest of their industry, must work with all their might to perfect the public's reason, to extend, to enlarge its intelligence, one must be well imbued with this idea, that he who wishes to disseminate a certain instruction, like he who proposes to put into circulation any other product whatsoever, must, above all, have regard for felt needs, and take into consideration the state of demand.

It is no less essential that he know the state of the offer, that is to say, the nature and extent of the means employed to satisfy the existing need for instruction. What is the number of establishments already consecrated to the propagation of the ideas in question? What are their processes? What is their expense? Can the service they provide be done better or at less cost? These are questions that must first be resolved. It is a preliminary account to be drawn up. It would be insane to undertake anything before having gathered the elements of this account, having examined them attentively, and having assured oneself, as much as possible, that there is, in effect, something useful to attempt, and that one is not going to waste one's time, one's capital, one's intelligence, without fruit for the public and with great harm to the people with whom one is going to compete, and especially to oneself.

Finally, to this capacity to judge thus, by anticipation, the goodness of the enterprise one proposes to undertake, it is equally indispensable to join the talent for administering it well. A journal, a publishing house, a school, are industrial enterprises that have just as great a need to be well conducted as any other kind of industrial establishment.

Here, therefore, one needs, above all, the diverse talents that constitute the man of business, that is to say, the talents for speculating, administering, and accounting; and the more a writer, a publisher, a teacher have the passion to be useful, the more it matters, for that very reason, that they know what can succeed, what kind of teaching can be received, what order of reasonable ideas one can try to disseminate, and by what means the success of such an enterprise will be best assured. In no field is any good to be expected from a poorly conceived and poorly conducted establishment, and one always serves the interests of the public poorly when one ruins one's own affairs.

Thus, the talent for business has its marked place at the head of the industries that act on the intelligence as at the head of the other industries. It is, in these arts as in all, the most fundamental condition of success.

§ 5. In their turn, the knowledge of the trade, theoretical notions, the talent for applications and for execution, and, in general, the diverse kinds of capacity that constitute the genius of the artist rather than that of the speculator, and which relate to the execution rather than to the direction of enterprises, are likewise of necessity in them.

Among the means of this second order, the practical knowledge of the trade is the one I place in the first rank; that is to say, to form intelligences for any kind of exercise whatsoever, the habit of teaching is the kind of capacity that seems to me the most necessary or the first necessary. It is very possible, in effect, that a man having more extensive or more profound knowledge of a science than another, may yet be less able to teach it.

There is in the act of transmitting any order of knowledge a particular talent different from that knowledge itself, and which constitutes the art of teaching. This art, like all, was formed by a series of trial and error and experiments. To possess it, one must have acted oneself on minds and on many minds, have become accustomed to distinguishing their diverse dispositions, have observed the difficulties one commonly experiences in making them pass through a certain series of ideas, and know which of these ideas must be inculcated in them first, which must come after, and the order in which they must all be presented to them. One must have noted especially the points before which most minds stop, the intervals they have the most trouble in crossing, and the means by which one best succeeds in making them surmount these obstacles. Now, practice, and a long practice, is necessary for all that, and the best theories on the nature of the human mind, on the order in which its knowledge is linked, cannot take the place of the means procured by the habit and experience of teaching.

However, in a class of industries whose principal object is to put minds in possession of acquired knowledge, it is not doubtful that the perfection of this knowledge is a great means of power and liberty of action. The perfection of the sciences, in effect, depends greatly on that of their methods, that is to say, on the goodness of the processes according to which they were formed and according to which they continue to extend. Now, it is easy to conceive that the more they have been formed according to good methods, the easier it must be to teach them. Ideas are transmitted, in effect, by the same means by which they are acquired, and the more the means employed to acquire them are of a nature to make their acquisition easy, the more the same means evidently must facilitate their transmission. There are, it is said, many different ways of teaching the same thing: doubtless, because there are many bad ways of knowing it; but as there is only one good way of knowing it, it seems that there can also be only one good way of learning it, and that the good way of learning it is absolutely the same as the good way of knowing it.

If, therefore, to be in a state to teach a science, the first thing required is to have been much exercised in it, the second is that this science be well made, and practice, here as elsewhere, receives the greatest help from the perfection of theories. Before the renovation of chemistry, it took, according to Lavoisier[^538], three or four years to make a chemist, or what was then called a chemist: today a course in chemistry requires scarcely a year; and, in a space of time three times shorter, one traverses, with an easy and firm step, a chain of knowledge perhaps ten times more extensive. One can judge by this single fact to what point the acquisition and transmission of ideas become easier as methods are more perfected, that is to say, as one has succeeded in better classifying objects in the descriptive sciences, and in discovering in the experimental sciences the fact that can best account for all the others.

It is easy to see in geography, botany, zoology, and in other descriptive sciences, what power good methods of classification give to the mind for embracing and retaining a great number of objects at once. These methods, in truth, do not make known the nature of things; but by introducing a certain order into their distribution, by forming distinct groups of all those that resemble one another, by observing in the denomination of these groups the same analogy as in their formation, they prevent the mind from being overwhelmed by them, and permit it to grasp, in a single view, infinitely more considerable quantities of them. How much, for example, has our power of conceiving numbers not been increased by the system of decimal numeration, and by the simple and admirable manner in which the units in this system are grouped! What a multitude of objects does a naturalist not succeed in filing away in his mind by analogous processes[^539]!

On the other hand, it is no less easy to see in chemistry, physics, astronomy, and in other experimental sciences, what power the discovery of certain facts gives to the mind for the explanation of a whole ensemble of phenomena. How much, for example, has the discovery of the law of gravitation not given of facility for the understanding of astronomical phenomena! There is a force that makes all bodies gravitate toward one another in direct proportion to their mass, and in inverse proportion to the square of their respective distances. This is the force that makes heavy bodies fall here below. It is this force that makes the fruit detaching from this tree go toward the earth. It would act on this fruit were it elevated to three thousand toises, were it at ten thousand. It must therefore act from the place where the globe of the moon is located. It can therefore be the same force that makes the moon gravitate toward the earth; the same that makes Jupiter's satellites weigh upon Jupiter; that makes Saturn's moons revolve around Saturn; that constrains all these secondary planets, while revolving around their central planet, to revolve at the same time with it around the sun. This force acts everywhere in the same manner and according to the same laws. There is no variation in the course of the moon, in its distances from the earth, in the figure of its orbit—sometimes approaching an ellipse and sometimes a circle—that is not a consequence of gravitation in proportion to the distance from the earth and the distance from the sun. The slightest variations in the course of the stars are a necessary effect of the same cause... This is how, with the help of a single fact, one comes to know the vastest of systems. Step by step, one will rise to knowledge that seemed placed forever beyond the reach of human understanding. Newton will dare to calculate, for example, what the weight of bodies must be in other spheres than our own; he will dare to say what what we here call an ounce, a pound, must weigh on Saturn or in the sun, and these extraordinary calculations will be but rigorous deductions from this general observation that bodies weigh upon one another in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distances. It would be easy to show by many other examples what power the goodness of methods gives to teaching, and how much easier it becomes to learn and to teach a science as its theory is perfected.

If the perfection of theories is of great importance, the talent for applications cannot be indifferent. To what end would it serve, in effect, for a science to be better made if one continued to teach it by the old processes? What would it matter that Bacon discovered, two centuries ago, a better method of philosophizing, if logic, in our schools, were still reduced to the art of the syllogism, and if one confined the study of nature to that of Aristotle and his categories? It is evident that the industries that are occupied with the education of the intelligence can draw some profit from the progress of methods and the reformation of the sciences only insofar as these useful perfections make themselves felt in practice, and as they serve to improve the forms of teaching.

Finally, there is here, as in all the arts, a talent for workmanship different from the knowledge of the trade, from theoretical notions, from the genius for applications, and which is no less necessary than these diverse kinds of capacity to the liberty of the industries that act on the intelligence. This talent is neither that of the scholar who finds new methods, nor that of the teacher who undertakes to apply them: it is that of the professors whom this teacher attaches to his enterprise. These professors are the workers of his establishment. It is they who act immediately on the intelligences and who give them the diverse forms they are destined to receive.

[^538]: Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, Preliminary Discourse. [^539]: See, on this subject, the work of M. Destutt de Tracy, entitled: On Logic.I observe, however, a rather notable difference between these workers and those of many other factories: it is that here a single worker creates a great number of products at once, whereas elsewhere a single product is ordinarily the work of a great number of people. In a pin factory, for example, eighteen or twenty people contribute to the making of each pin, whereas it often happens in a school that a professor gives the same fashioning to several hundred intelligences at once. I could also observe that it is much more difficult to fashion the mind than matter, and that it takes infinitely more time to bend our intellectual organs to certain exercises than to impress a determined form upon a raw body. But I do not know if these remarks would lead us to anything useful, and I will not dwell on them. The only thing on which I insist is that there is a workmanship in the arts that act on the intelligence, even though the intelligence is not fashioned by hand, and that the power of these arts is all the greater, as the men charged with this workmanship are more skilled in executing it.

All the faculties that pertain to the art, like those that relate to business, thus find their application here. Let us see the influence that moral habits in turn exercise upon them, and first let us seek how those of these habits that tend more particularly to the conservation and perfection of the individual apply to them.

§ 6. The first thing that strikes me is that the men who make their profession the culture of intelligences are called, by that very fact, to make a more habitual, more sustained, and at the same time more energetic, finer, more subtle use of their intellectual faculties than most other workers. Consequently, they seem to have more need than others to avoid any error of regimen that would tend to dull these delicate faculties or to trouble them in their functions. Gluttony, drunkenness, incontinence, would have particularly vexatious effects for them. The more effort they demand of their intelligence, the less they can demand of another order of faculties. The more their nervous system is excited, solicited, fatigued by the habitual work of their mental faculties, the more they must forbid themselves the abuse of all pleasures that have the particular effect of shaking and wearing out the nervous system.

It is not without example, it is true, that men of genius, very inclined to certain vices, have fallen into excesses of more than one kind, without appearing to lose anything of the vigor of their mind; but besides the fact that one may have been very well deceived here by appearances, one must conclude nothing for the common run of men from what is possible for certain entirely privileged constitutions. Let us not hesitate, therefore, to recognize that one of the first needs of the artists who make a profession of cultivating their mind and of forming that of other men, is to yield to the appetites of the body only with great discernment and restraint. The more they use regimen, the more they know how to regulate the exercise of their faculties, so as to give and habitually preserve for their intelligence the degree of energy, clarity, and sensitivity of which it is naturally susceptible, the stronger and freer they will be in the exercise of their art.

We know what role these industrious people play in the social economy. They are like the soul of society; they correct it of its errors; they polish, enlighten, and direct it. The more elevated these functions are, the more it is desirable that those who fulfill them find themselves placed in a situation that does not contrast too much with the dignity of their ministry, that preserves them from all cowardice, all baseness, all compliance contrary to the interests of truth. They therefore have even more need than other professions to enjoy a certain fortune, and the more they possess the moral qualities necessary to acquire and preserve it, the more they are diligent, active, economical, the more they secure for themselves, relative to the exercise of their art, power and liberty.

One of their first needs, I say, is to create an independent existence for themselves. However, if it were to be wished that they possess a certain fortune, it would be less suitable for them than for others to yield to expensive tastes. Luxury, which has appeared to us so contrary to the progress of all industries, is particularly fatal to those that work for the intelligence. The more a nation feels an attraction for the pleasures of the senses, of vanity, of pomp, the less it has for those of the mind, the less it seeks the products destined to satisfy it, the less the creators of these products are considered, the less easy it is for them to find a good use for their productive faculties.

Paris, the most lettered city in this kingdom, and perhaps in the world; Paris, which makes the fortune of several thousand wine and food merchants, of about fifteen hundred grocers, of one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven fruit or vegetable merchants, of seven hundred and eighty-seven lemonade sellers, of six hundred and ninety manufacturers of jewelry and finery [^540], Paris has work for only eighty printers, and counts two or three times more restaurateurs than booksellers. And even then, the booksellers and printers of Paris do not work only for Paris, but for all of France, and even a little for foreign countries. One sees that the lettered city is above all the gourmand city, the sumptuous city.

For the rest, it is nearly the same in all the cities of the world. Everywhere, the men most sure of making a fortune are those who work for the senses and for vanity. Among the productions of the mind, the most frivolous, those that address the imagination or the passions, everywhere find infinitely more buyers than those that speak directly to the intelligence: the French stage barely takes in receipts as considerable as Brunet's theater; ten thousand times more novels are read than books of science; Madame Pasta will earn five or six thousand guineas in London in a few months, and the most renowned publicist will have great difficulty making two or three hundred pounds sterling a year there.

One feels, therefore, how important it is for the industrious who work for the intelligence, even looking only at the interest of their art, to spread the taste for intellectual enjoyments, to make war on pomp, ostentation, and sensuality, and to be the first to give the example of that simplicity of morals which excludes neither well-being, nor comforts, nor a certain elegance, but which leaves the mind free for more elevated pleasures [^541].

The industrious people with whom I am concerned are called, by the very nature of their labors, to rectify many ideas, to introduce a great number of new ones. Thereby, they ceaselessly prepare the reform of establishments or institutions founded on previously accredited errors, and consequently they ceaselessly threaten the status of the individuals or classes whose existence is attached to that of these errors. Thus, there are no professions that stir up more hatred and are exposed to more persecution. Since the beginning of the world, the habitual destiny of the men who have devoted themselves to the culture and advancement of the intelligence has been to be persecuted. There are, therefore, few professions that require more courage, not that which is needed to take a battery, nor to face a stormy sea, but that tranquil firmness of spirit which is necessary to speak, when one must, truths that wound, to attack abuses in credit, to consent to weaken the expression of one's thought only insofar as the interest of truth requires it, to boldly devote one's life to the defense of the truth. Of all the moral qualities that the industries in question in this chapter demand, this one is perhaps the one it is least possible to do without; and the more a writer is at the same time a man of courage, the more he exercises his art with power and with fruit. But this leads me to speak of the civil habits that the same industries demand, for one needs courage to publish the truth only because he who speaks it is exposed to unjust aggressions.

§ 7. If, to be strong, the men who make a profession of acting on intelligences need, like the other classes of industrious people, and perhaps more than any other class, to submit, in their private life, to a good moral regimen; if their power is more or less increased by a habitual practice of sobriety, temperance, economy, courage, simplicity of tastes and morals, and by a whole ensemble of good personal habits, it is not doubtful that the existence, relative to their art, of good civil habits is at least as proper to facilitate its exercise and to extend its power.

The more individuals, parties, constituted authorities, and society as a whole know how to keep themselves within the bounds of common law, relative to the action of speaking, writing, printing, and teaching, the more the men who write and who teach can exercise their industry with facility and with liberty.

There are two ways of departing from the limits of justice in this regard: the first is to make a pernicious use of these industries; the second, to monopolize their use.

On the one hand, it can very well happen that writers and professors make themselves guilty, in the exercise of their art, of harmful and punishable actions. It is possible that they may directly commit offenses, that they may outrage public morals, that they may insult or defame individuals, constituted powers, parties, even entire nations. It is also possible that they may make themselves accomplices in offenses in which they would not participate directly, that they may incite the commission of these offenses, that they may provoke theft, murder, rebellion, or other crimes.

That such an abuse of the arts, whose mission is to form intelligences, has the effect of paralyzing their action, is a thing so evident that it is hardly necessary to stop to demonstrate it. In the midst of the hatreds and discords that an overflow of defamations or seditious preachings naturally tends to create, one soon no longer enjoys enough security and tranquility of mind to devote oneself to study, to compose good writings, to think of opening schools: one no more dares to found scientific enterprises than commercial or manufacturing ones.

Besides, the peaceful search for truth then loses much of its interest. As soon as the furies of partisan spirit have invaded the pulpit, the tribune, the bar, the schools, the journals, the books, one can say that the movement of ideas is interrupted, that the work of intelligences is arrested: the passions alone occupy the stage, and they alone are in progress, because they alone act. There is no one who has not remarked that times of crisis and great fermentation are precisely those when one reads and meditates the least, when one does the least research, observation, and scientific experimentation.

Finally, a last effect of the excesses of which I speak is to furnish the parties in possession of power with more or less specious pretexts for enslaving the arts that serve to commit them. This is so true that the most ordinary tactic of despotism, whenever it has been forced to leave some latitude to the literary and scientific industries, has been to secretly foment the abuse of these industries in order to authorize itself to invade them anew and to make itself their master once again.

This usurpation is, as I have said, a second way of departing, relative to these industries, from the limits of justice. While certain men can use them to do evil, it is possible that others may undertake to monopolize them. It may happen that bold monopolists raise the pretension of enjoying, to the exclusion of everyone, the faculty of stating, publishing, and circulating their ideas; the liberty of writing, teaching, preaching, etc.

In truth, it will not be simple individuals who will ever form such pretensions. I do not think that any have been seen so shameless as to dare to say to other men: You will print only what pleases us; you will teach only by our good pleasure; you will teach only what we wish; no one may know but what it suits us for them to know; one will read only our gazettes, one will receive lessons only from our professors; one will send one's children only to our schools; one will hear speeches only from our orators, sermons only from our priests, etc.

But what private individuals would never dare to permit themselves, men in possession of public power have at all times permitted themselves. At all epochs, the first thought of victorious leagues, sects, and factions has been to chain the spirit of the vanquished populations, to prevent them from using their intelligence. The detail of what has been attempted for that, in our country alone, in the course of the last three centuries, would suffice to fill a long series of volumes. From that ordinance of January 13, 1535, by which a king, nicknamed the father of letters, suppressed all the printing presses in the kingdom and forbade the printing of any work under penalty of the gallows, down to the bill by which a famous ministry still tried, not three years ago, to stifle all publicity in France, one would find thousands of acts of every kind, edicts, ordinances, decrees, laws, judgments, declarations, lettres de cachet, directed against the faculty of publishing opinions, of spreading ideas, of acting orally or in writing upon intelligences.

At this very moment, the legislation that governs us is full of violent dispositions against the faculty of establishing schools and against that of printing, selling, and distributing writings.

We know first, as to the first of these faculties, that it is entirely in the hands of the public power. It is impossible to form any educational establishment whatsoever without the permission of the authority. The authority holds under its dependence everything from the teaching of the most elevated special knowledge down to that of the most inferior primary instruction. A father of a family who wished to gather at his home the children of a friend with his own children, under the direction of a preceptor in his pay, would be accused of encroaching upon the privileges of the University [^542]. One cannot give a public course, free or paid, on the most indifferent subject, without the authorization of the ministry. Professors have been seen tormented, threatened with prosecution, for a few lessons given at home to isolated individuals [^543]. At the same time, very important branches of teaching, such as politics, morality, and political economy, are excluded from almost all the schools that the government tolerates or pays for. A capitation tax of 60 francs, under the name of university levy, is raised on every child to whom his parents wish to give the instruction vulgarly called secondary. Access to special knowledge is made still more difficult by the fees, taxes, and burdensome regulations to which it is subjected. At all levels of the university hierarchy, the fate of the establishments, the masters, and the students is subject to the most discouraging arbitrariness. To suppress schools, dismiss professors, expel students, exclude them from all the schools in the country, make them lose registrations, months and years of study, have been, for fifteen years, acts, if not habitual, at least frequent enough on the part of the administration.

To these hindrances against the faculty of instructing men in schools are joined those against the faculty of forming them by writings. Only a certain number of printers and booksellers are tolerated; they can be arbitrarily stripped of their profession. It was still necessary, barely two years ago, to have the authorization of the government to establish a periodical paper. Even today, these sorts of enterprises are possible only for male individuals of legal age, native-born subjects, who can furnish a high security deposit, who can prove a certain fortune, and who consent to make certain declarations. The price of the papers they publish is raised by various taxes from thirty to forty percent. The administration, master of the postal service, finds itself master, by that very fact, of stopping or suspending the circulation of writings, and more than once it has happened to abuse in this regard the facilities that its privilege offered it [^544].

[^540]: Census of the population of Paris in 1817. [^541]: See, on this subject, the work of M. Droz, entitled: On Political Economy, or Principles of the Science of Riches. [^542]: See, on this subject, my work entitled: On Teaching in its Relations with Industry. [^543]: See the journal Le Globe, year 1827. [^544]: See, on this subject, the journal Le Globe, year 1827.One thing that might be surprising, if one did not know to what point we can let ourselves be imposed upon by the apparatus of force and authority, is that such enterprises, which, on the part of private individuals, would seem the height of audacity or dementia, when formed by men in possession of power, find a multitude of minds disposed to tolerate, to excuse, even to approve of them. One would be universally revolted if simple individuals wished to place the slightest obstacle to the legitimate exercise of the mind and to the just manifestation of its acts; and, as if actions changed their nature according to the character or the number of the men who commit them, the same excess, undertaken by parties, sects, constituted powers, no longer offers anything at which certain people are astonished. It is only since yesterday, so to speak, that the mass of honest and sensible men has shown itself to be decidedly opposed to the brigandage of censorship. Many people even, whose minds revolt at the idea of this tyranny, view with a much calmer eye other enterprises, almost as flagrant, against the faculty of publishing writings; and, as for that of forming schools, almost no one yet thinks of demanding that the authority cease to place obstacles in its way: the nec plus ultra of liberal pretensions is, not that everyone should enjoy it, but that the Jesuits should not, that everything be reduced to common servitude, that everything submit to the yoke of the University.

Do I need to say that the liberty of the arts charged with the education of intelligences is incompatible with these dispositions of the public, with such an imperfection of its civil habits? If, for the exercise of these arts to be possible, one must avoid employing them to do harm; if one must abstain with the same care from monopolizing them, it is at least as essential to prevent anyone from monopolizing them. It must be known, it must be generally felt that such an attempt is not tolerable on the part of anyone; that it is criminal in itself, independently of the manner in which it is formed, and of the number or quality of the persons who do it; that it is even all the more condemnable as those who do it enjoy a greater sum of forces; and that, if it is desirable that it be punished in all cases, it would be especially good for it to be so when it is formed by powers whose first obligation is to repress all unjust enterprises.

Surely, we must all desire that society employ a part of its force or that of the powers it institutes to repress defamations, outrages, and incitements to vice and crime; but one thing that we must perhaps desire even more keenly is that it impose upon itself and that it imperiously impose upon its delegates the duty of letting every man exercise in peace, so long as he is not guilty of any offense, his intelligence and that of others on any kind of subject whatsoever and by any means whatsoever. The restrictions that the powers instituted by it place on this faculty are one of the causes that most hinder its exercise, that most slow and distort its development. This is a truth that I have expounded elsewhere [^545] in detail, and which, moreover, it is almost enough to state to make it understood.

Thus, so long as the morals of society allow for this sort of excess, so long as it can watch with a cool head the parties that successively arrive in power permit themselves, each in their turn, to regulate, according to their passions or the interests of their politics, the use that will be permitted of the faculty of speaking, writing, printing, and teaching, one can say that there is no true progress, no true liberty possible for the arts that work on the education of the human understanding.

If, therefore, the liberty of this class of professions requires of those who exercise them that they perfect their personal morals, that they adopt the kind of life and contract the habits most proper to preserve and increase the power of their mind, it demands above all that the generality of citizens have learned enough how to live, have perfected their morals of relation enough not to mutually hinder one another in the inoffensive use of their intellectual faculties.

§ 8. There is therefore no order of personal means that does not apply without difficulty to the arts that act on the intelligence. The same can be said of the diverse orders of powers that enter into the composition of the real stock; we are going to see, in effect, that this class of industries can no more do without than all the others a well-situated, well-equipped workshop, provided with the necessary implements and where the occupations are suitably separated.

One easily feels, for example, that the situation of the workshop is not an indifferent thing here. It is clear that a school has more chances of success where the circumstances favorable to its establishment are found united in greater number; where it is easier for it to procure the professors, books, and instruments necessary for its labors; where, above all, the kind of instruction it aims to disseminate is more generally in demand. Thus, a school of mineralogy may be very suitably placed in the vicinity of considerable mines and in the midst of a numerous population of miners; a school of mechanics and chemistry, in the heart of an entirely manufacturing city, etc. It is doubtless rare, for this kind of establishment as for all, that all the favorable circumstances are found united in one place; but it is perhaps rarer still that there is not one place that deserves to be preferred to the others; and it is certain that the teacher who knows how to choose the most suitable one thereby adds to his means of power and liberty of action.

If this teacher increases his forces by the discernment with which he chooses the place of his establishment, it seems that he increases them still more by the manner in which he organizes it. The mutual instruction schools offer a striking example of the advantageous results it is possible to obtain thereby. Their superiority over ordinary schools, in effect, is not due so much to the goodness of the methods followed in them, to the perfection of their charts and their elementary books, as to the material disposition of the premises, to the order according to which the pupils are classed, arranged, and made to act, and in general to what I call the good organization of the workshop.

Now, such is the influence of this means here that a single master, in a mutual instruction school, can suffice for the elementary education of a thousand children; that the instruction he gives them is at once faster, more complete, less tiring, and less harmful to their health than that which they would receive in ordinary schools; that it costs only seven or eight francs per year for each child, whereas it costs seventeen or eighteen francs in the other schools; and finally that with the seventeen million francs that families or communes spend annually in our country for the education of a million boys, one could easily instruct two million and provide for the so-neglected teaching of young girls [^546] . One would therefore remain below the truth in saying that, by the fact of the superior organization of the workshop in mutual instruction schools, the power of teaching is more than tripled.

Perhaps this power is still more sensibly increased by the intervention of machines.

It is true that it is even less easy to use physical motors to form the intelligence of man than to act on the human body; and it is not probable that genius, which has succeeded in having so many diverse trades exercised by blind machines, will ever succeed in transforming the fire pump into a skilled demonstrator. However, besides the fact that there is no mechanism that, by itself, does not act to a certain point on our mind, and the sight of which cannot teach us something, one can say that there are no machines that, in the hands of man, do not serve to explain certain effects, and moreover, that there are many effects that one could not explain without machines.

Without the help of machines, there is a multitude of phenomena that would elude any kind of investigation, and that would remain eternally outside the sphere of the intelligence, because they are placed beyond the reach of the senses. Some escape us by their extreme smallness, others by their excessive distance, others by the obscurity that surrounds them, others by the difficulty of disengaging them from the objects that strike our sight, etc.

How, for example, can one reason on the weight and temperature of the atmosphere, without the help of the barometer and the thermometer? How can one treat of electricity, without the help of the electric machine? What progress has the microscope not brought to natural history, and the telescope to astronomy! How many discoveries are owed to the pneumatic machine, to the Voltaic pile, and to a hundred other kinds of instruments that the physical sciences employ! With the help of these instruments, a new world has been revealed to us; thousands of hidden truths have become ostensible; and the arts charged with the education of the intelligence have been able to give it numerous and important fashionings that it would never have received without this help.

Not only does the human mind need machines to penetrate the secrets of nature, to form itself, to acquire ideas; but it needs them to transmit the notions it has acquired, and the arts with which I am concerned are all the more powerful and free as they are provided for that with more perfected instruments. The first of these instruments are languages. The more progress languages have made, the easier it is for cultivated minds to communicate their knowledge to others.

Articulated language is a better instrument than sign language: one is therefore freer to express one's thought and to impress it upon the intelligence of another by speech than by gestures. Written speech is a more powerful instrument than articulated speech: one is therefore freer to act on the minds of one's fellow men when one knows how to figure speech to the eyes than when one only knows how to articulate it. The press is an instrument two or three hundred times more powerful than the pen: one is therefore two or three hundred times freer to enter into a relation of ideas with other men when one can spread one's ideas by printing than when one can only publish them by writing.

There are then infinite degrees in the power of the press and its modes of publication. Periodical writings are a more powerful instrument of publication than isolated books. Daily publications are a more powerful instrument than periodical writings. The newspapers themselves are a more or less powerful instrument, according to whether they are formed on a more or less well-conceived system, according to whether they are of a nature to connect a more or less considerable number of professions, according to whether they are more or less rapidly printed, according to whether they are more or less promptly distributed.

One cannot deny, for example, that these diverse means are employed in England in such a way as to derive more benefit from them than elsewhere. Large books there are reserved for the advancement of doctrines. The reviews serve for their diffusion. As for the newspapers, they fulfill another task: they dissert very little; but they regularly inform each profession of the offers and demands of all the others; they instruct them all of the news that may interest them; they are immense collections of facts and announcements; they serve as intermediaries for all relations. On the other hand, they are printed and distributed with such great rapidity that a certain speech by a certain orator of the Commons, barely delivered at six o'clock in the evening, is printed, distributed, and read throughout the city of London before ten o'clock at night. Thirty hours after the close of a discussion in Parliament, the report of it is already public in the city of York, eighty leagues from London. It is literally true to say that a member of Parliament speaks to the entire nation [^547] . The press, pushed to this degree of perfection,

“becomes for man like a new and powerful organ by means of which he makes himself heard at all distances and from all sides at the same time. Through it, peoples are in permanent conversation. Sentiments, ideas, opinions propagate with the rapidity of the electric fluid, and the commotion stops only at the point where one no longer knows how to read [^548] .”

However, this means of communication between intelligences is not yet the fastest of all. The immaterial products of the mind have this advantage, that they can be transmitted by simple signs over great distances, such that in transmitting the sign one transmits the thought signified. Telegraphy is therefore an even faster means of communication than the press. With the help of telegraph lines, human thought traverses the airs on the wings of light, and crosses space in the blink of an eye. Telegraphs are, in a way, a means of conversing at great distances. In truth, this means cannot be employed for uses as extensive as printing. But, to transmit facts rapidly, there is neither courier nor steam carriage that equals it. Paris can have news from Lille, sixty leagues distant, in two minutes; from Strasbourg, one hundred and twenty leagues distant, in five minutes and fifty-two seconds; from Brest, one hundred and fifty leagues distant, in six minutes and fifty seconds; from Bayonne, more than two hundred leagues distant, in less than fourteen minutes... But that is enough to give an idea of the help that the arts that act on the human mind can draw from machines.

Can one doubt that, in its turn, the division of labor communicates to them a great surplus of power? Who would not be struck by the extensive use they make of this means? Who could count all the branches of the encyclopedic tree? Who could tell the divisions and subdivisions that have been made in studies and in teaching? There are schools for primary instruction; there are some for a higher teaching; there are some for special knowledge; there are some for the application of this knowledge; there exist particular schools for each branch of special teaching, and the specialties are almost without number.

Within each particular establishment the work is subdivided again; teaching is ordinarily divided into eight classes in a mutual instruction school, that is to say that, to teach children to read in such a school, their intelligence is successively given eight sorts of fashioning. In secondary schools, in colleges, in special schools, teaching likewise undergoes numerous subdivisions.

“In a well-organized academic manufactory,” observes an English writer, “a young doctor is finished only after having passed from hand to hand, like the pin in the workshops dedicated to this kind of fabrication. Rough-hewn by the professor of anatomy, he must successively deliver all the parts of his intelligence and his memory to a series of operations that is terminated by the professor of materia medica [^549] .”

In a word, the work that is done on the mind is subject to the same divisions and subdivisions as that which is done on matter, and these divisions produce here the same results as everywhere else: economy of time, celerity and greater perfection of the work, more rapid progress of the art, that is what is owed to them. Thanks to this sharing, the men devoted to the culture of the human understanding, each confined within his specialty, acquire a more profound knowledge of it, become much more skilled in teaching it, and act in mass with infinitely more power [^550] .

Thus the good location of the workshop, its organization, the instruments employed in it, the manner in which the work is divided, everything that contributes to the perfection of the stock of real objects, just as everything that increases the stock of personal faculties, is a means of force in the arts that act on the understanding as in those that work on raw matter. It only remains for me to say a few words on the effect that results from the simultaneous progress of all these means.

§ 9. Independently of the effects proper to it, each of the powers of labor has others that it obtains through the concourse of the other collateral powers, and the influence that each exercises is all the greater, not only as it is more perfected, but as all the others are more so. I have already shown several times how much the action of any order of labors manifested itself by more considerable effects as the capital sum of all its means increased. This general result is no less perceptible here than in most of the arts I have treated in the preceding chapters.

[^545]: On Teaching in its Relations with Industry. [^547]: Edinburgh Review, No. 88. [^548]: On Moral Perfection, by M. de Gérando. [^549]: Edinburgh Review, No. 88. [^550]: On Logic, by M. Destutt de Tracy.In Paris, toward the end of the fourteenth century, there were only forty schoolmasters and twenty schoolmistresses: today there are probably several thousand educational establishments. Forty years ago, only seven million men in France knew how to read: today there are more than sixteen million. In 1770, there were only four book-lenders in London: today there are more than two hundred. At that time, there were no reading societies or reading rooms: today there are more than two thousand. In 1814, the products of the non-periodical press in our country did not amount annually to forty-six million sheets: by 1815, they had passed fifty-five million; in 1820, they rose to nearly eighty-one; in 1825, they exceeded one hundred and twenty-eight, and in 1826, one hundred and forty-four million sheets. In 1817, only thirty-eight thousand two hundred and forty reams of paper had been stamped for newspapers: in 1820, fifty thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven reams were already being stamped. According to a document published by the House of Commons, there were only seventy-nine newspapers in England in 1782: this number had risen to one hundred and forty-six in 1790, and, in 1821, it was two hundred and eighty-four: it had quadrupled in the space of forty years. Periodical publications have followed an even more rapid progression in the United States. In 1720, there were only seven newspapers: ninety years later, in 1810, there were three hundred and fifty-nine; from 1810 to 1823, this number rose to five hundred and eighty-eight; and from 1823 to 1826, it climbed to six hundred and forty [^551].

One sees what an increasing progression the products of the arts that cultivate the human understanding follow, as a more perfected or more considerable capital is applied to them: ideas provoke ideas; books beget books; readers engender readers; newspapers multiply newspapers; schools give birth to schools. The more this capital increases, the more it is, like all possible capitals, susceptible of being increased. Where its diffusion is greater, things are feasible that would not be where it is less so. Such will be, among the Anglo-Americans, for example, the universality of a certain secondary instruction, the need to propagate this instruction still further, and the facilities left for this by good public habits and the absence of taxes and hindrances resulting from these habits, that this people, with its ten million souls, will publish more newspapers than all of Europe with its one hundred and sixty million inhabitants. England, partly for the same reasons, will have more newspapers, bookshops, and reading rooms than France. In England, there will not be a hamlet that does not have its school; and in our country, out of forty thousand communes, twenty thousand will lack schools for boys, and twenty-five thousand will have none for girls. Our best periodical writings will not have more than twelve to fifteen hundred subscribers, and three Reviews in the United States will each have a print run of four or five thousand copies. Only one copy of a newspaper will be published each day in Paris for every three hundred and eighty-eight people, while in London one copy will be published for every forty-three. Only one letter will be written daily in Paris for every seventy-two people, while one will be written for every nine people in London. Ninety Englishmen will receive ten letters a day, and ninety Frenchmen will receive only one [^552]. There will be a greater movement of ideas, intellectual communications will be more active where instruction is more widespread, just as more elevated intellectual acts will be performed where instruction is higher. The people among whom certain kinds of knowledge are more developed will be able to arrive at conceptions that others cannot yet attain, and create intellectual products that others will only make after them.

In sum, there will be no progress that does not serve; a people will not have perfected a single one of the means of labor in its application to the culture of intelligences without one seeing this culture act with more power, and nowhere will it produce effects as extensive and as rapid as where the total mass of its means, the entire capital of its forces, has acquired more perfection and growth.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

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Notes

[^534]: Seeing the state of the intelligence thus constantly correspond to the state of the organ through which it is exercised, certain physiologists would be strongly disposed to conclude that it is the organ itself that is intelligent. But this conclusion would be just as forced as that of the psychologists who affirm that intelligence pertains to a principle distinct from the organ. The truth is that observation furnishes us with no means of knowing whether thought and the instrument by which man thinks are one and the same thing or two different things, and that it is equally beyond our power, speaking scientifically, to be materialists and to be spiritualists. We can, scientifically, concern ourselves with the organ and its functions; but as for knowing whether the brain functions by itself or by virtue of an immaterial agent, that is what surpasses the powers of science and what faith alone can teach. Let us therefore limit ourselves here to saying that the organ is indispensable to the function, and that to influence the function it is indispensable to act upon the organ. [^535]: It is good that he makes them trot before him, to judge their pace. (MONTAIGNE.) [^536]: V., in the seventh issue of the Revue britannique, an excellent article on public instruction, translated from the Westminster Review. [^537]: V., in the seventh issue of the Revue britannique, the article already cited. [^538]: Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, prelim. disc., p. 12. [^539]: V. the Elem. of Nat. Hist. by M. Duméril, vol. I, p. 183 et seq. [^540]: Statistical Research on Paris, year 1823, tables nos. 81, 85, 91. [^541]: It is easy to observe that as habits become more regular and more sensible, the character of publications improves; that useful works are more in demand, and frivolous books less so. This is something that was well established by the valuable work that M. Daru published a few years ago on the movements of the book trade in France since the Restoration. One could see in this work that, from 1814 to 1826, the number of all publications had increased, but that the proportions had changed noticeably; that books of pure entertainment, which had been in the first rank under the Empire, were now only in the second, and that more serious and more important publications, such as, on the one hand, travels, ancient history, and especially contemporary history, and on the other hand, books of jurisprudence and legislation, had passed from the third rank to the first, and from the fifth to the fourth. [^542]: V., in the Courrier Français of July 1, 1822, an article extracted from l'Écho de l'Ouest. [^543]: Idem. [^544]: I have just said that in France the price of newspapers is raised by taxes of forty percent. However exorbitant such a contribution may seem, one is forced to admit that it is light in comparison with the crushing tax to which the same means of instruction is subjected in England. In that country, a newspaper sheet, which would cost only four sous, is brought, by taxes, to fourteen sous, that is to say, to three and a half times the same sum, which makes a price increase of two hundred and fifty percent. (Brit. Rev., vol. V, p. 41 and 42). One sees that it is not only in our country that instruction has appeared to be the taxable matter par excellence, and that efforts have been made to put the most powerful means of propagating it beyond the reach of the masses. [^545]: Vol. VI of the Censeur Européen, p. 50 to 121. [^546]: V., in the Paris newspapers of the first days of February 1828, the details published on this subject by the Society for Elementary Instruction. [^547]: V. the letters of M. de Staël on England, p. 198 and 200. [^548]: It is General Tarayre, one of the men who best understands the civilization of our time, who characterized the press with this rare felicity. [^549]: V. the Brit. Rev. no. 12, p. 247 to 249. [^550]: However, it must be recognized that the extreme specialization of studies and teaching would not fail, in the long run, to harm the breadth and even the soundness of minds if one did not strive to remedy the disadvantages it presents by establishing a new specialty, which would consist in showing the relations and the chain of all knowledge, in summarizing the principles proper to each of them into a smaller number of common principles, in generalizing on one side while analyzing on the other, and finally in preventing the whole from being lost sight of while penetrating ever deeper into the details. Such is one of the principal objects that an alumnus of the École Polytechnique, M. Aug. Comte, seems to propose in an important course he has just opened at the Athénée, under the title of Course on Positive Philosophy. The nature and goal of this elevated teaching are explained with talent in the professor's opening discourse, inserted in the Rev. encyclop. of Nov. 1829, p. 273 et seq. [^551]: For the facts cited in this paragraph and in the one that follows, see M. Monteil, Histoire des Français des divers états aux cinq derniers siècles, vol. I, p. 407; M. Ch. Dupin, Situation progressive des forces de la France depuis 1814;— the Courrier Français of February 2, 1828, p. 4, col. 2; - the Revue Britannique, vol. X, p. 172 and 373; the Notices statistiques sur la librairie en France, published in 1827, by Count Daru; – and, in the Edinburgh Rev. of October 1819, an article on the comparative industries of France and England. [^552]: This comparison between the extent and activity of intellectual communications in France and in England, taken from the article in the Edinburgh Review cited on the other side, dates from 1819. I do not know if it was very accurate then; but certainly it is no longer so today. One can see, in official documents from the French postal administration, published in the Paris newspapers of January 9 and 10, 1830, how much the activity of letter correspondence has increased in France, and notably in Paris, over the last fifteen years. Other information shows to what extent our newspapers have multiplied. It is true that a corresponding progression must have taken place in England. I do not know if it has been more or less rapid, and if the ratios are still the same or if they have changed.