第8章 Letter VI(2)

It was,no doubt,reasonable to expect that the simple organisation of the primitive republics should survive the quaintness of primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity.But,instead of rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life,this organisation degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism.The zoophyte condition of the Grecian states,where each individual enjoyed an independent life,and could,in cases of necessity,become a separate whole and unit in himself,gave way to an ingenious mechanism,whence,from the splitting up into numberless parts,there results a mechanical life in the combination.Then there was a rupture between the state and the church,between laws and customs;enjoyment was separated from labour,the means from the end,the effort from the reward.Man himself eternally chained down to a little fragment of the whole,only forms a kind of fragment;having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually revolving wheel,he never develops the harmony of his being;and instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being,he ends by being nothing more than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself,of the science that he cultivates.This very partial and paltry relation,linking the isolated members to the whole,does not depend on forms that are given spontaneously;for how could a complicated machine,which shuns the light,conaide itself to the free will of man?This relation is rather dictated,with a rigorous strictness,by a formulary in which the free intelligence of man is chained down.The dead letter takes the place of a living meaning,and a practised memory becomes a safer guide than genius and feeling.

If the community or state measures man by his function,only asking of its citizens memory,or the intelligence of a craftsman,or mechanical skill,we cannot be surprised that the other faculties of the mind are neglected,for the exclusive culture of the one that brings in honour and profit.Such is the necessary result of an organisation that is indifferent about character,only looking to acquirements,whilst in other cases it tolerates the thickest darkness,to favour a spirit of law and order;it must result if it wishes that individuals in the exercise of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to lose in extension.We are aware,no doubt,that a powerful genius does not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions;but mediocre talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble energy;and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of preference,without prejudice to its functions,such a state of things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar.Moreover,it is rarely a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a capacity superior to your employment,or one of those noble intellectual cravings of a man of talent which contend in rivalry with the duties of office.The state is so jealous of the exclusive possession of its servants that it would prefer -nor can it be blamed in this -for functionaries to show their powers with the Venus of Cytherea rather than the Uranian Venus.

It is thus that concrete individual life is extinguished,in order that the abstract whole may continue its miserable life,and the state remains for ever a stranger to its citizens,because feeling does not discover it anywhere.The governing authorities find themselves compelled to classify,and thereby simplify,the multiplicity of citizens,and only to know humanity in a representative form and at second hand.Accordingly they end by entirely losing sight of humanity,and by confounding it with a simple artificial creation of the understanding,whilst on their part the subject classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that address themselves so little to their personality.At length society,weary of having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to lighten,falls to pieces and is broken up -a destiny that has long since attended most European states.They are dissolved in what may be called a state of moral nature,in which public authority is only one function more,hated and deceived by those who think it necessary,respected only by those who can do without it.

Thus compressed between two forces,within and without,could humanity follow any other course than that which it has taken?The speculative mind,pursuing imprescriptible goods and rights in the sphere of ideas,must needs have become a stranger to the world of sense,and lose sight of matter for the sake of form.On its part,the world of public affairs,shut up in a monotonous circle of objects,and even there restricted by formulas,was led to lose sight of the life and liberty of the whole,while becoming impoverished at the same time in its own sphere.Just as the speculative mind was tempted to model the real after the intelligible,and to raise the subjective laws of its imagination into laws constituting the existence of things,so the state spirit rushed into the opposite extreme,wished to make a particular and fragmentary experience the measure of all observation,and to apply without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular craft.The speculative mind had necessarily to become the prey of a vain subtlety,the state spirit of a narrow pedantry;for the former was placed too high to see the individual,and the latter too low to survey the whole.