_______________________________
Custom Search
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
[This translation, which has been prepared
by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, is available for general use
but has some copyright restrictions. For details, see Copyright.
This text (2012) is a slightly revised version of a translation first published
on the internet in 2008. For comments, questions, suggestions for improvements,
and so on, please contact Ian Johnston]
Table of Contents
Translator’s Note
In the following text there are two sorts of footnotes, those
provided by Rousseau and those provided by the translator. All of the former
are indicated by the phrase [Rousseau’s
note] at the start of the footnote. Those without this bracketed phrase
have been provided by the translator.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the famous Swiss philosopher,
wrote A Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences (commonly called The First
Discourse) in 1750, as his entry in a competition set by the Academy of
Dijon. His essay won first prize. His success very quickly elevated him from
obscurity and made him an intellectual celebrity.
Discourse
which was awarded the prize by the Academy of Dijon
in the year 1750
On this Question, which the Academy itself proposed,
Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to
refining moral practices?
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor
illis.
Ovid*
What is celebrity? Here is the unfortunate work to which I owe my
own. It is certain that this piece, which won me a prize and made my name, is
mediocre at best, and I venture to add that it is one of the least in this
whole collection. What an abyss of miseries the author would have avoided, if
this first book had been received only according to its merits! But it was
inevitable that an initially unjustified favour gradually brought me severe
treatment which is even more undeserved.*
Preface
Here is one of the greatest and most beautiful questions ever
raised. In this Discourse it is not at all a question of those metaphysical
subtleties which have triumphed over all parts of literature and from which
programs in an Academy are not always exempt. However, it does concern one of
those truths upon which rest the happiness of the human race.
I anticipate that people will have difficulty forgiving me for
the position which I have dared to take. By colliding head on with everything
which wins men’s admiration nowadays, I can expect only universal censure. And
I cannot count on public approval just because I have been honoured with the
approbation of some wise men. But still, I have taken my position. I am not
worried about pleasing sophisticated minds or fashionable people. In every
period there will be men fated to be governed by the opinions of their century,
their country, and their society. For that very reason, a free thinker or
philosopher today would have been nothing but a fanatic at the time of the
League.*
One must not write for such readers, if one wishes to live beyond one’s own
age.
One more word, and I’ll be finished. Little expecting the honour
I received, since I submitted this Discourse, I have reorganized and expanded
it, to the point of making it, in one way or another, a different work. Today I
believe I am obliged to restore it to the state it was in when it was awarded
the prize. I have only thrown in some notes and left two readily recognizable
additions, of which the Academy perhaps might not have approved. I thought that
equity, respect, and gratitude demanded that I provide this notice.
Decipimur specie recti.*
Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to
the purification or to the corruption of morality? This is the matter we have
to examine. What side should I take on this question? That, gentlemen, which
suits an honourable man who knows nothing and who does not, for that reason,
think any less of himself.
It will be difficult, I sense, to adapt what I have to say for
the tribunal before which I am appearing. How can one venture to blame the
sciences in front of one of the most scholarly societies in Europe, praise
ignorance in a famous Academy, and reconcile a contempt for study with respect
for truly learned men? I have seen these contradictions, and they have not
discouraged me. I am not mistreating science, I told myself; I am defending
virtue in front of virtuous men. Integrity is cherished among good people even
more than erudition is among scholars. So what am I afraid of? The enlightened
minds of the assembly which is listening to me? I confess that is a fear. But
it is a fear about the construction of the Discourse and not about the feelings
of the speaker. Equitable sovereigns have never hesitated to condemn themselves
in doubtful arguments, and the most advantageous position in a just cause is to
have to defend oneself against a well-informed party who is judging his own
case with integrity.
To this motive, which encourages me, is added another which
makes me resolute: after I have upheld, according to my natural intelligence,
the side of truth, no matter what success I have, there is a prize which I
cannot fail to win. I will find it in the depths of my heart.
It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow
emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his
reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising above himself,
soaring in his mind right up to the celestial regions, moving, like the sun,
with giant strides through the vast extent of the universe, and, what is even
greater and more difficult, returning to himself in order to study man there
and learn of his nature, his obligations, and his end. All of these marvellous
things have been renewed in the past few generations.
Europe had fallen back into the barbarity of the first ages.
People from this part of world, so enlightened today, lived a few centuries ago
in a state worse than ignorance. Some sort of learned jargon much more
despicable than ignorance had usurped the name of knowledge and set up an
almost invincible obstacle in the way of its return. A revolution was necessary
to bring men back to common sense, and it finally came from a quarter where one
would least expect it. It was the stupid Muslim, the eternal blight on
learning, who brought about its rebirth among us. The collapse of the throne of
Constantine carried into Italy the debris of ancient Greece. France, in its
turn, was enriched by these precious remnants. The sciences soon followed
letters. To the art of writing was joined the art of thinking, a sequence which
may seem strange but which is perhaps only too natural. And people began to
feel the main advantage of busying themselves with the Muses, which is to make
men more sociable by inspiring in them the desire to please each other with
works worthy of their mutual approbation.
The mind has its needs, just as the body does. The latter are
the foundations of society; from the former emerge the pleasures of society.
While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men
in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more
powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down,
snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear
to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what
are called civilized people. Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts
have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those
who nurture them.*
Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined
and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that
urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a
word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any.
By this type of politeness, all the more amiable for being less
pretentious, in previous ages Athens and Rome distinguished themselves in the
days when they received so much praise for their magnificence and splendour. In
that civility our age and our nation will, no doubt, surpass all ages and all
peoples. A philosophical tone without pedantry, natural yet considerate manners,
equally remote from Teutonic boorishness and Italian pantomime: there you have
the fruits of a taste acquired by good education and perfected by social
interaction.
How sweet it would be to live among us, if the exterior
appearance was always an image of the heart’s tendencies; if decency was a
virtue; if our maxims served us as rules; if true philosophy was inseparable
from the title of philosopher! But so many qualities too rarely go together,
and virtue hardly ever walks in so much pomp. Richness in dress can announce a
man with money and elegance a man with taste. The healthy, robust man is
recognized by other signs. It is under the rustic clothing of a labourer and
not under the gilded frame of a courtesan that one will find physical strength
and energy. Finery is no less a stranger to virtue, which is the power and
vigour of the soul. The good man is an athlete who delights in fighting naked.
He despises all those vile ornaments which hamper the use of his strength, the
majority of which were invented only to conceal some deformity.
Before art fashioned our manners and taught our passions to
speak an affected language, our habits were rustic but natural, and differences
in behaviour announced at first glance differences in character. Human nature
was not fundamentally better, but men found their security in the ease with
which they could see through each other, and this advantage, whose value we no
longer feel, spared them many vices.
Nowadays, when more subtle studies and a more refined taste have
reduced the art of pleasing into principles, a vile and misleading uniformity
governs our customs, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mould:
incessantly politeness makes demands, propriety issues orders, and incessantly
people follow customary usage, never their own inclinations. They no longer
dare to appear as they are. And in this perpetual constraint, men who make up
this herd we call society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the
same things, unless more powerful motives prevent them. Thus, one will never
know well the person one is dealing with. For to get to know one’s friend it
will be necessary to wait for critical occasions, that is to say, to wait until
too late, because it is to deal with these very emergencies that one needed to
know him in the first place.
What a parade of vices will accompany this uncertainty? No more
sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded trust.
Suspicions, offences, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, and betrayal will
always be hiding under this uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under
that urbanity which is so praised and which we owe to our century’s
enlightenment. We will no longer profane the name of the Master of the Universe
by swearing, but we will insult it with blasphemies, and our scrupulous ears
will not be offended. People will not boast of their own merit, but they will
demean that of others. No man will grossly abuse his enemy, but he will slander
him with skill. National hatreds will expand, but that will be for love of
one’s country. In place of contemptible ignorance, we will substitute a
dangerous Pyrrhonism.*
There will be some forbidden excesses, dishonourable vices, but others will be
decorated with the name of virtues. It will be necessary to have them or to
affect them. Let anyone who wishes boast about the sobriety of the wise men of
our time. As for me, I see nothing there but a refinement of intemperance every
bit as unworthy of my praise as their artificial simplicity.*
Such is the purity our morality has acquired. In this way we
have become respectable people. It is up to literature, the sciences, and the
arts to claim responsibility for their share in this salutary work. I will add
merely one reflection, as follows: an inhabitant in some distant country who
wished to form some idea of European morals based on the condition of the
sciences among us, on the perfection of our arts, on the propriety of our
entertainments, on the politeness of our manners, on the affability of our
discussions, on our perpetual demonstrations of good will, and on that
turbulent competition among men of all ages and all conditions who appear to be
fussing from dawn to sunset about helping one another, then this stranger, I say,
would guess that our morals are exactly the opposite of what they are.
Where there is no effect, there is no cause to look for. But
here the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have become
corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards
perfection. Will someone say that this is a misfortune peculiar to our age? No,
gentlemen. The evils brought about by our vain curiosity are as old as the
world. The daily ebb and flow of the ocean’s waters have not been more regularly
subjected to the orbit of the star which gives us light during the night than
the fate of morals and respectability has been to progress in the sciences and
arts. We have seen virtue fly away to the extent that their light has risen
over our horizon, and the same phenomenon can be observed at all times and in
all places.
Look at Egypt, that first school of the universe, that climate
so fertile under a bronze sky, that celebrated country, which Sesostris left
long ago to conquer the world. It became the mother of philosophy and fine
arts, and, soon afterwards, was conquered by Cambyses, then by the Greeks,
Romans, Arabs, and finally by the Turks.*
Look at Greece, once populated with heroes who twice vanquished Asia,
once before Troy and then again in their own homeland. The early growth of
literature had not yet carried corruption into the hearts of its inhabitants,
but progress in the arts, the dissolution of morality, and the Macedonian yoke
followed closely on one another’s heels, and Greece, always knowledgeable,
always voluptuous, always enslaved, achieved nothing more in its revolutions
except changes in its masters. All the eloquence of Demosthenes could never
reanimate a body which luxury and the arts had enervated.*
It was at the time of Ennius and Terence that Rome, founded by a
shepherd and made famous by farmers, began to degenerate. But after Ovid,
Catullus, Martial, and that crowd of obscene authors, whose very names alarm one’s
sense of decency, Rome, formerly the temple of virtue, became the theatre of
crime, the disgrace of nations, and the toy of barbarians. This capital of the
world eventually falls under the yoke which it had imposed on so many people,
and the day of its fall was the day before one of its citizens was given the
title of Arbiter of Good Taste.*
What shall I say about that great city of the Eastern Empire
which by its position seemed destined to be the capital of the whole world, that
sanctuary for the sciences and arts forbidden in the rest of Europe, perhaps
more through wisdom than barbarity? Everything that is most disgraceful in
debauchery and corruption—treasons, assassinations, the blackest poisons, and
the even more atrocious combination of all these crimes—that is what makes up
the fabric of the history of Constantinople; that is the pure source from which
we were sent that enlightenment for which our age glorifies itself.
But why seek in such distant times for proofs of a truth for
which we have existing evidence right before our eyes. There is in Asia an
immense country where literary honours lead to the highest offices of state. If
the sciences purified morals, if they taught men to shed their own blood for
their country, if they inspired courage, the people of China would become wise,
free, and invincible. But if there is no vice which does not rule over them, no
crime unfamiliar to them, if neither the enlightenment of ministers, nor the
alleged wisdom in the laws, nor the multitude of inhabitants of that vast
empire was capable of keeping it safe from the ignorant and coarse yoke of the
Tartars, what use have all these wise men been to them? What fruits has it
reaped from all the honours lavished on them? Could it perhaps be the reward of
being an enslaved and wicked people?
Let us contrast these pictures with those of the morals of a
small number of people who, protected from this contagion of vain knowledge,
have by their virtues created their own happiness and become an example to
other nations. Such were the first Persians, a remarkable nation, in which
people learned virtue the way people learn science among us, which conquered
Asia so easily, and which was the only one to acquire the glory of having the
history of its institutions taken for a philosophical novel. Such were the
Scythians to whom we have been left such magnificent tributes. Such were the
Germans, in whom a writer who had grown weary of tracing the crimes and
baseness of an educated, opulent, and voluptuous people found relief by
describing their simplicity, innocence, and virtues. Rome had been like that,
especially in the time of its poverty and ignorance. And finally up to the
present day that rustic nation has shown itself to be like this, so lauded for
its courage, which adversity has not been able to defeat, and for its fidelity
which bad examples could not corrupt.*
It was not through stupidity that the latter have preferred
other exercises to those of the mind. They were not ignorant of the fact that
in other lands idle men spent their lives disputing their sovereign good, vice,
and virtue, and that proud reasoners, while giving themselves the greatest
praise, shoved all other people together under the contemptuous name of barbarians.
But they looked at their morals and learned to despise their learning.*
Could I forget that it was the very heart of Greece that saw the
emergence of that city as famous for its happy ignorance as for the wisdom of
its laws, whose virtues seemed so much greater than those of human beings that
it was a republic of demigods rather than of men. O Sparta! How you eternally
shame a vain doctrine! While the vices led along by the fine arts were
introduced together with them in Athens, while a tyrant there collected with so
much care the works of the prince of poets, you were chasing the arts and the
artists, the sciences and the learned men from your walls.*
That event was an indication of this difference—Athens became
the abode of politeness and good taste, the land of orators and philosophers.
The elegance of the buildings there corresponded to that of its language. In
every quarter there, one could see marble and canvas brought to life by the
hands of the most accomplished masters. From Athens came those amazing works
which would serve as models in all corrupt ages. The picture of Sparta is less
brilliant. “In that place,” other peoples used to say, “the men are born
virtuous, and even the air of the country seems to inspire virtue.” Nothing is
left for us of its inhabitants except the memory of their heroic actions.
Should monuments like that be less valuable for us than those remarkable
marbles which Athens has left us?
It is true that some wise men resisted the general torrent and
avoided vice while living with the Muses. But one needs to hear the judgment
which the most important and most unfortunate among them delivered on the
learned men and artists of his time.
“I examined the poets,” he says, “and I look on them as people
whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves
as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.”
“From poets,” Socrates continues, “I moved to artists. No one
was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists
possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was
no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same
misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty,
they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption
completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place
of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be—what I am or what
they are, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing—I
replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.”
“We do not know—neither the sophists, nor the poets, nor the
orators, nor the artists, nor I—what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is.
But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing,
they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least
have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the
oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am
strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.”
So there you have the wisest of men in the judgment of the gods
and the most knowledgeable Athenian in the opinion of all of Greece, Socrates,
singing the praises of ignorance! Do we believe that if he came to life among
us, our learned men and our artists would make him change his opinion? No,
gentlemen. This just man would continue to despise our vain sciences; he would
not help to augment that pile of books with which we are swamped from all
directions, and he would leave after him, as he once did, nothing by way of a
moral precept for his disciples and our posterity other than his example and
the memory of his virtue. It is beautiful to teach men in this way!
Socrates had started in Athens. In Rome Cato the Elder continued
to rage against those artificial and subtle Greeks who were seducing virtue and
weakening the courage of his fellow citizens.* But the sciences, arts, and dialectic prevailed
once more. Rome was filled with philosophers and orators, military discipline
was neglected, and agriculture despised. People embraced factions and forgot
about their fatherland. The sacred names of liberty, disinterestedness, and
obedience to the laws gave way to the names Epicurus, Zeno, and Arcesilas.*
“Since the learned men began to appear among us,” their own philosophers used
to say, “good people have slipped away.” Up to that time Romans had been
content to practise virtue; everything was lost when they began to study it.
O Fabricius! What would your great soul have thought, if to your
own misfortune you had been called back to life and had seen the pompous face
of this Rome saved by your efforts, the city which your honourable name had
distinguished more than all its conquests? “Gods,” you would have said, “what
has happened to those thatched roofs and those rustic dwelling places where,
back then, moderation and virtue lived? What fatal splendour has succeeded
Roman simplicity? What is this strange language? What are these effeminate
customs? What do these statues signify, these paintings, these buildings? You
mad people, what have you done? You, masters of nations, have you turned
yourself into the slaves of the frivolous men you conquered? Are you now
governed by rhetoricians? Was it to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and
comic actors that you soaked Greece and Asia with your blood? Are the spoils of
Carthage trophies for a flute player? Romans, hurry up and tear down these
amphitheatres, break up these marbles, burn these paintings, chase out these
slaves who are subjugating you, whose fatal arts are corrupting you. Let other
hands distinguish themselves with vain talents. The only talent worthy of Rome
is that of conquering the world and making virtue reign there. When Cineas took
our Senate for an assembly of kings, he was not dazzled by a vain pomp or by an
affected elegance. He did not hear there this frivolous eloquence, the study
and charm of futile men. What then did Cineas see that was so majestic? O
citizens! He saw a spectacle which your riches or all your arts will never
produce, the most beautiful sight which has ever appeared under heaven, an assembly
of two hundred virtuous men, worthy of commanding in Rome and governing the
earth.”*
But let us move across time and distance between places and see
what has happened in our countries, before our own eyes, or rather, let us set
aside the hateful pictures which would wound our sensitivity, and spare
ourselves the trouble of repeating the same things under other names. It is not
in vain that I called upon the shade of Fabricius, and what did I make that
great man say that I could not have put into the mouth of Louis XII or of Henry
IV? Among us, to be sure, Socrates would not have drunk hemlock, but he would
have drunk, in an even bitterer cup, insulting mockery and contempt a hundred
times worse than death.*
There you see how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every
age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to
emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us. The thick
veil with which she had covered all her operations seemed to provide a
sufficient warning to us that she had not destined us for vain researches. But
have we known how to profit from any of her lessons? Have we neglected any with
impunity? Peoples, know once and for all that nature wished to protect you from
knowledge, just as a mother snatches away a dangerous weapon from the hands of
her child, that all the secrets which she keeps hidden from you are so many
evils she is defending you against, and that the difficulty you experience in educating
yourselves is not the least of her benefits. Men are perverse; they would be
even worse if they had had the misfortune of being born knowledgeable.
How humiliating these reflections are for humanity! How our
pride must be mortified by them! What! Could integrity be the daughter of
ignorance? Could knowledge and virtue be incompatible? What consequences could
we not draw from these opinions? But to reconcile these apparent
contradictions, it is necessary only to examine closely the vanity and the emptiness
of those proud titles which dazzle us and which we hand out so gratuitously to
human learning. Let us therefore consider the sciences and the arts in
themselves. Let us see what must be the result of their progress. And let us no
longer hesitate to concur on all points where our reasoning finds itself in
agreement with conclusions drawn from history.
It was an old tradition, passed on from Egypt into Greece, that
a god hostile to men’s peace and quiet was the inventor of the sciences.*
What opinion, then, must the Egyptians themselves have had about the sciences
which were born among them? They could observe near at hand the sources which
produced them. In fact, whether we leaf through the annals of the world or
supplement uncertain chronicles with philosophical research, we will not find
an origin for human learning which corresponds to the idea we like to create
for it. Astronomy was born from superstition, eloquence from ambition, hate,
flattery, and lies, geometry from avarice, physics from a vain
curiosity—everything, even morality itself, from human pride. The sciences and
the arts thus owe their birth to our vices; we would have fewer doubts about
their advantages if they owed their birth to our virtues.
The flaw in their origin is only too evidently redrawn for us in
their objects. What would we do with the arts, without the luxury which
nourishes them? Without human injustice, what is the use of jurisprudence? What
would become of history if there were neither tyrants, nor wars, nor
conspirators? In a word, who would want to spend his life in such sterile
contemplation, if each man consulted only his human duties and natural needs
and had time only for his country, for the unfortunate, and for his friends? Are
we thus fated to die tied down on the edge of the pits where truth has gone
into hiding? This single reflection should discourage, right from the outset,
every man who would seriously seek to instruct himself through the study of
philosophy.
What dangers lurk! What false routes into an investigation of
the sciences! How many errors, a thousand times more dangerous than the truth
is useful, does one not have to get past to reach the truth? The disadvantage
is clear, for what is false is susceptible to an infinity of combinations, but
truth has only one form of being. Besides, who is seeking it in full sincerity?
Even with the greatest good will, by what marks does one recognize it for
certain? In this crowd of different opinions, what will be our criterion to
judge it properly?*
And the most difficult point of all: if by luck we do end up finding the truth,
who among us will know how to make good use of it?
If our sciences are vain in the objects they set for themselves,
they are even more dangerous in the effects they produce. Born in idleness,
they nourish it in their turn. And the irreparable loss of time is the first
damage they necessarily inflict on society. In politics, as in morality, it is
a great evil not to do good. And we could perhaps look on every useless citizen
as a pernicious man. So answer me, illustrious philosophers, those of you
thanks to whom we know in what proportions bodies attract each other in a
vacuum, what are, in the planetary orbits, the ratios of the areas gone through
in equal times, what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection and
cusps, how man sees everything in God, how the soul and the body work together
without communication, just as two clocks do, what stars could be inhabited,
which insects reproduce in an extraordinary way, answer me, I say, you from
whom we have received so much sublime knowledge, if you had never taught us
anything about these things, would we have been less numerous, less well
governed, less formidable, less thriving, or more perverse? So go back over the
importance of what you have produced, and if the work of our most enlightened
scholars and of our best citizens brings us so little of any use, tell us what
we should think of that crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who
are uselessly devouring the substance of the state.
Did I say idle? Would to God they really were! Our morality
would be healthier and society more peaceful. But these vain and futile
declaimers move around in all directions armed with their fatal paradoxes,
undermining the foundations of faith, and annihilating virtue. They smile with
disdain at those old words fatherland and religion and dedicate their talents
and their philosophy to the destruction and degradation of everything which is
sacred among men. Not that they basically hate either virtue or our dogmas. It
is public opinion they are opposed to, and to bring them back to the foot of
the altar, all one would have to do is make them live among atheists. O this
rage to make oneself stand out, what are you not capable of?
To misuse one’s time is a great evil. But other even worse evils
come with arts and letters. Luxury is such an evil, born, like them, from the idleness
and vanity of men. Luxury rarely comes along without the sciences and the arts,
and they never develop without it. I know that our philosophy, always fertile
in remarkable maxims, maintains, contrary to the experience of all the ages,
that luxury creates the splendour of states, but, having forgotten about the
need for Sumptuary Laws, will philosophy still dare to deny that good morals
are essential to the duration of empires and that luxury is diametrically
opposed to good morals?*
True, luxury may be a sure sign of riches, and it even serves, if you like, to
multiply them. What will we necessarily conclude from this paradox, so worthy
of arising in our day, and what will virtue become when people must enrich
themselves at any price? Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality
and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell
you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in
Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a
man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They
assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to
the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been
worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians.* Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two
republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which
one made Asia tremble?
The kingdom of Cyrus was conquered with thirty thousand men by a
prince poorer than the least of the Persian satraps, and the Scythians, the
most miserable of all peoples, managed to resist the most powerful kings of the
universe. Two famous republics were fighting for imperial control of the world.
One was very rich; the other had nothing. And the latter destroyed the former.
The Roman Empire, in its turn, after gulping down all the riches in the
universe, became the prey of a people who did not even know what wealth was.
The Franks conquered the Gauls, and the Saxons conquered England, without any
treasures other than their bravery and their poverty. A bunch of poor mountain
dwellers whose greed was limited to a few sheep skins, after crushing Austrian
pride, wiped out that opulent and formidable House of Burgundy, which had made
the potentates of Europe shake. Finally, all the power and all the wisdom of
Charles V’s heir, supported by all the treasures of the Indies, ended up being
shattered by a handful of herring fishermen. Let our politicians deign to
suspend their calculations in order to reflect upon these examples, and let
them learn for once that with money one has everything except morals and
citizens.
What, then, is precisely the issue in this question of luxury?
To know which of the following is more important to empires: to be brilliant
and momentary or virtuous and lasting. I say brilliant, but with what lustre? A
taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for
honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile
concerns would ever raise themselves to anything great. Even when they had the
strength for that, the courage would be missing.
Every artist wishes to be applauded. The praises of his
contemporaries are the most precious part of his reward. What will he do to
obtain that praise if he has the misfortune of being born among a people and in
a time when learned men have come into fashion and have seen to it that
frivolous young people set the tone, where men have sacrificed their taste to
those who tyrannize over their liberty,* where one of the sexes dares to approve only what
corresponds to the pusillanimity of the other and people let masterpieces of
dramatic poetry fall by the wayside and are repelled by works of wonderful
harmony? What will that artist do, gentlemen? He will lower his genius to the
level of his age and will prefer to create commonplace works which people will
admire during his life than marvelous ones which will not be admired until long
after his death. Tell us, famous Arouet, how many strong and manly beauties you
have sacrificed to our false delicacy and how many great things the spirit of
gallantry, so fertile in small things, has cost you.*
In this way, the dissolution of morals, a necessary consequence
of luxury, brings with it, in its turn, the corruption of taste. If by chance
among men of extraordinary talents there is one who has a firm soul and refuses
to lend himself to the spirit of his age and demean himself with puerile works,
too bad for him! He will die in poverty and oblivion. I wish I were making a
prediction here and not describing experience! Carle and Pierre, the moment has
come when that paintbrush destined to augment the majesty of our temples with
sublime and holy images will fall from your hands or will be prostituted to
decorate carriage panels with lascivious paintings. And you, rival of
Praxiteles and Phidias, you whose chisel the ancients would have used to create
for them gods capable of excusing their idolatry in our eyes, inimitable
Pigalle, your hand will be resigned to refinishing the belly of an ape, or it
will have to remain idle.*
One cannot reflect on morals without deriving pleasure from
recalling the picture of the simplicity of the first ages. It is a lovely
shore, adorned only by the hands of nature, toward which one is always turning
one’s eyes, and from which one feels, with regret, oneself growing more
distant. When innocent and virtuous men liked to have gods as witnesses of
their actions, they lived with them in the same huts. But having soon become
evil, they grew weary of these inconvenient spectators and relegated them to
magnificent temples. Finally, they chased the gods out of those so they could
set themselves up in the temples, or at least the gods’ temples were no longer
distinguished from the citizens’ houses. This was then the height of depravity,
and vices were never pushed further than when one saw them, so to speak, propped
up on marble columns and carved into Corinthian capitals in the entrance ways
of great men’s palaces.
While the commodities of life multiply, while the arts perfect
themselves, and while luxury spreads, true courage grows enervated, and
military virtues vanish—once again the work of the sciences and all those arts
which are practised in the shadows of the study. When the Goths ravaged Greece,
all the libraries were rescued from the flames only by the opinion spread by
one of them that they should let their enemies have properties so suitable for
turning them away from military exercise and for keeping them amused with
sedentary and idle occupations. Charles VIII saw himself master of Tuscany and
the Kingdom of Naples without hardly drawing his sword, and all his court
attributed the unhoped for ease of this to the fact that the princes and the
nobility of Italy enjoyed making themselves clever and learned more than they
did training to become vigorous and warlike. In fact, says the sensible man who
describes these two characteristics, every example teaches us that in military
policy and all things similar to it, the study of the sciences is far more
suitable for softening and emasculating courageous qualities than for
strengthening and animating them.
The Romans maintained that military virtue was extinguished
among them to the extent that they began to know all about paintings,
engravings, and vases worked in gold and silver, and to cultivate the fine
arts. And, as if this famous country was destined to serve constantly as an
example for other peoples, the rise of the Medici and the re-establishment of
letters led once again and perhaps for all time to the fall of that warrior
reputation which Italy seemed to have regained a few centuries ago.
The ancient republics of Greece, with that wisdom which shone
out from most of their institutions, prohibited their citizens all tranquil and
sedentary occupations which, by weakening and corrupting the body, quickly
enervate vigour in the soul. In fact, how can men whom the smallest need
overwhelms and the least trouble repels look on hunger, thirst, exhaustion,
dangers, and death? With what courage will soldiers endure excessive work with
which they are quite unfamiliar? With what enthusiasm will they make forced marches
under officers who do not have the strength to make the journey even on
horseback? And let no one offer objections concerning the celebrated valour of
these modern warriors who are so disciplined in their learning. People boast
highly to me of their bravery on a day of battle, but no one says anything
about how they bear an excess of work, how they resist the harshness of the
seasons and bad weather. It requires only a little sun or snow, only the lack
of a few superfluities, to melt down and destroy in a few days the best of our
armies. Intrepid warriors, for once accept the truth which you so rarely hear:
you are brave, I know that; you would have triumphed with Hannibal at Cannae
and at Trasimene; with you Caesar would have crossed the Rubicon and enslaved
his people. But with you the former would not have crossed the Alps and the
latter would not have conquered your ancestors.*
Combat does not always produce success in war, and for generals
there is an art superior to the art of winning battles. A man can run
fearlessly into the firing line; nonetheless, he can be a very bad officer.
Even in a soldier, perhaps a little more strength and energy could be more
essential than so much courage, which does not protect him from death. And what
does it matter to the State whether its troops die of fever and cold or by the
enemy’s sword?
If cultivating the sciences is detrimental to warrior qualities,
it is even more so to moral qualities. From our very first years our inane
education decorates our minds and corrupts our judgment. I see all over the
place immense establishments where young people are raised at great expense to
learn everything except their obligations. Your children will know nothing of
their own language, but they will speak in others which are nowhere in use.
They will know how to compose verses which they will hardly be capable of
understanding. Without knowing how to distinguish truth and error, they will
possess the art of making both truth and error unrecognizable to others through
specious arguments. But they will not know what the words magnanimity,
temperance, humanity, and courage mean. That sweet name of fatherland will
never strike their ears, and if they hear talk of God, that will be less to be
in awe of Him than to fear Him.* I would be just as happy, a wise man said, for my
pupil to spend his time playing tennis. At least that would make his body more
fit. I know that it is necessary to keep children busy and that idleness is for
them the danger one should fear most. What then is necessary for them to learn?
Now, that’s surely a good question! Let them learn what they ought to do as
men,*
and not something they ought to forget.
Our gardens are decorated with statues and our galleries with
paintings. What do you think these artistic masterpieces on show for public
admiration represent? Those who have defended their country? Or those even
greater men who have enriched it with their virtues? No. They are images of all
the errors of the heart and mind, carefully derived from ancient mythology, and
presented to our children’s curiosity at a young age, no doubt so that they may
have right before their eyes models of bad actions even before they know how to
read.
From where do all these abuses arise if it is not the fatal
inequality introduced among men by distinctions among their talents and by the
degradation of their virtues? There you have the most obvious effect of all our
studies and the most dangerous of all their consequences. We no longer ask if a
man has integrity, but if he has talent, nor whether a book is useful but if it
is well written. The rewards for a witty man are enormous, while virtue remains
without honour. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine
actions. Let someone tell me, nonetheless, if the glory attached to the best of
the discourses which will be crowned in this Academy is comparable to the merit
of having founded the prize?
The wise man does not run after fortune, but he is not
insensitive to glory. And when he sees it so badly distributed, his virtue,
which a little praise would have energized and made advantageous to society,
grows sluggish, and dies away in misery and oblivion. That is what, in the long
run, must be the result everywhere of a preference for agreeable talents rather
than useful ones, and that is what experience has only too often confirmed
since the re-establishment of the sciences and the arts. We have physicians,
mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters, but we no
longer have citizens. Or if we still have some scattered in our abandoned
countryside, they are dying there in poverty and disgrace. Such is the
condition to which those who give us bread and who provide milk for our
children are reduced, and those are the feelings we have for them.
However, I admit that the evil is not as great as it could have
become. Eternal foresight, by placing beside various harmful plants some
healthy medicinal herbs and setting inside the body of several harmful animals
the remedy for their wounds, has taught sovereigns, who are its ministers, to
imitate its wisdom. Through this example, the great monarch, whose glory will
only acquire new brilliance from age to age, has drawn from the very bosom of
the sciences and the arts, sources of a thousand disturbances, those famous
societies charged with the dangerous storage of human knowledge and, at the
same time, with the sacred preservation of morals, through the care they take
to maintain the total purity of their trust among themselves and to demand such
purity from the members they admit.*
These wise institutions, reinforced by his august successor and
imitated by all the kings in Europe, will serve at least as a restraint on men
of letters, who all aspire to the honour of being admitted into the Academies
and will thus watch over themselves and will try to make themselves worthy of
that with useful works and irreproachable morals. Of these companies, those who
offer in their competitions for prizes with which they honour literary merit a
choice of subjects appropriate to reanimating the love of virtue in citizens’
hearts will demonstrate that this love reigns among them and will give people
such a rare and sweet pleasure of seeing the learned societies dedicating
themselves to pouring out for the human race, not merely agreeable
enlightenment, but also beneficial teaching.
Let no one therefore make an objection which is for me only a
new proof. So many precautions reveal only too clearly how necessary it is to
take them. People do not seek remedies for evils which do not exist. Why must
these ones, because of their inadequacy, still have the character of ordinary
remedies? So many institutions created for the benefit of the learned are only
all the more capable of impressing people with the objects of the sciences and
of directing minds towards their cultivation. It seems, to judge from the
precautions people take, that we have too many farm labourers and are afraid of
not having enough philosophers. I do not wish here to hazard a comparison
between agriculture and philosophy: people would not put up with that. I will
simply ask: What is philosophy? What do the writings of the best known
philosophers contain? What are the lessons of these friends of wisdom? To
listen to them, would one not take them for a troupe of charlatans crying out
in a public square, each from his own corner: “Come to me. I’m the only one who
is not wrong”? One of them maintains that there are no bodies and that
everything is appearance, another that there is no substance except matter, no
God other than the world. This one here proposes that there are no virtues or
vices, and that moral good and moral evil are chimeras, that one there that men
are wolves and can devour each other with a clear conscience. O great
philosophers, why not reserve these profitable lessons for your friends and
your children? You will soon earn your reward, and we would have no fear of
finding any of your followers among our own people.
There you have the marvellous men on whom the esteem of their
contemporaries was lavished during their lives and for whom immortality was
reserved after their passing away! Such are the wise maxims which we have
received from them and which we will pass down to our descendants from age to
age. Has paganism, though abandoned to all the caprices of human reason, left
posterity anything which could be compared to the shameful monuments which
printing has prepared for it under the reign of the Gospel? The profane
writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with them.* People had not yet invented the art of
immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind. But thanks to typographic
characters*
and the way we use them, the dangerous reveries of Hobbes and Spinoza will
remain forever. Go, you celebrated writings, which the ignorance and rustic
nature of our fathers would have been incapable of, go down to our descendants
with those even more dangerous writings which exude the corruption of morals in
our century, and together carry into the centuries to come a faithful history
of the progress and the advantages of our sciences and our arts. If they read
you, you will not leave them in any perplexity about the question we are
dealing with today. And unless they are more foolish than we are, they will
lift their hands to heaven and will say in the bitterness of their hearts,
“Almighty God, You who hold the minds of men in your hands, deliver us from the
enlightenment and the fatal arts of our fathers, and give us back ignorance,
innocence, and poverty, the only goods which can make our happiness and which
are precious in Your sight.”
But if the progress of the sciences and the arts has added
nothing to our true happiness, if it has corrupted our morality, and if that
moral corruption has damaged purity of taste, what will we think of that crowd
of simple writers who have removed from the temple of the Muses the
difficulties which safeguarded access to it and which nature had set up there
as a test of strength for those who would be tempted to learn? What will we
think of those compilers of works who have indiscriminately beaten down the
door to the sciences and introduced into their sanctuary a population unworthy
of approaching them; whereas, one would hope that all those who could not
advance far in a scholarly career would be turned back at the entrance way and
thrown into arts useful to society. A man who all his life will be a bad
versifier or a minor geometer could perhaps have become a great manufacturer of
textiles. Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of
teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton—these tutors of the human race had no need
of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where
their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their
understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first
obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the
immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to
devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be
only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men’s
footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of
people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. But if we wish
nothing to lie outside their genius, then nothing must lie beyond their hopes.
That’s the only encouragement they require. The soul adapts itself insensibly
to the objects which concern it, and it is great events which make great men.
The prince of eloquence was Consul of Rome, and perhaps the greatest of the
philosophers was Chancellor of England.* Can one believe that if one of them had occupied
only a chair in some university and the other had obtained only a modest
pension from an Academy, can one believe, I say, that their works would not
have been affected by their positions? So let kings not disdain to admit into
their councils the people who are most capable of giving good advice, and may
they give up that old prejudice invented by the pride of the great, that the
art of leading peoples is more difficult than the art of enlightening them, as
if it were easier to induce men to do good voluntarily than to compel them to
do it by force. May learned men of the first rank find honourable sanctuary in
their courts. May they obtain there the only reward worthy of them,
contributing through their influence to the happiness of those people to whom
they have taught wisdom. Then, and only then, will we see what can be achieved
by virtue, science, and authority, energized by a noble emulation and working
cooperatively for the happiness of the human race. But so long as power remains
by itself on one side, and enlightenment and wisdom isolated on the other, wise
men will rarely think of great things, princes will more rarely carry out fine
actions, and the people will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.
As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great
talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us
not run after a reputation which would elude us and which, in the present state
of things, would never give back to us what it would cost, even if we had all
the qualifications to obtain it. What good is it looking for our happiness in
the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves? Let us leave to others
the care of instructing people about their duties and limit ourselves to
carrying out our own well. We do not need to know any more
than this.
O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many troubles
and trappings necessary for one to know you? Are your principles not engraved
in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into
oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the
passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with
that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in
the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious
distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how
to speak well; the other how to act well.*
NOTES
*The Latin sentence translates as
follows: “In this place I am a barbarian, because they do not understand me.” [Back to Text]
*This Preliminary Notice was not in the original version of the discourse.
When he was preparing a collected edition of his work in 1763, Rousseau added
this opening paragraph. The “severe treatment” he mentions refers to the fact
that in 1762 his work Emile was
condemned in Paris and Geneva, and Rousseau was forced to undertake the first
of many unwelcome journeys to avoid arrest. [Back to
Text]
*The Holy League was formed by Catholics in France during the
sixteenth century to attack Protestants. [Back to
Text]
*The Latin, a quotation from Horace, translates: “We are
deceived by the appearance of right.” [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] Princes always are always happy to see
developing among their subjects the taste for agreeable arts and for
superfluities which do not result in the export of money. For quite apart from
the fact that with these they nourish that spiritual pettiness so appropriate
for servitude, they know very well that all the needs which people give
themselves are so many chains binding them. When Alexander wished to keep the
Ichthyophagi dependent on him, he forced them to abandon fishing and to nourish
themselves on foods common to other people. And no one has been able to
subjugate the savages in America, who go around quite naked and live only from
what their hunting provides. In fact, what yoke could be imposed on men who
have no need of anything? [Back to Text]
*Pyrrhonism (from the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis)
means here a sophisticated skepticism, a willingness to argue but without
taking a firm stand. [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] “I like,” says Montaigne, “to argue and
discuss, but only with a few men and for myself. Because to serve as a
spectacle for the great and to make a display of one’s wit and babbling is, I
find, an occupation very unsuitable to a man of honour.” But that is what all
our fine wits do, except for one. [Back to Text]
*Sesostris was a common name for Egyptian pharaohs. Sesostris I
was a pharaoh who conducted a number of military campaigns in Syria, Nubia, and
Libya. He also carried out an energetic program of building monuments. His rule
was a prosperous time for Egypt. Cambyses was a Persian Emperor who in 525 BC
invaded Egypt, overthrew the pharaoh, and began almost two centuries of Persian
control over Egypt. [Back to Text]
*Demosthenes (d. 322 BC) was the greatest of all the Greek
orators. Many of his finest speeches were trying to rouse the Greeks against
the imperial ambitions of the Macedonians. His attempts to foster rebellion
against the Macedonian control of Greece resulted in his having to commit
suicide. [Back to Text]
*Ennius (b. 239 BC) was the writer the Romans considered the
father of their poetry. Terence was one of their two most famous writers of
dramatic comedy. Ovid, Catullus, and Martial were important writers from a
later period (the first century BC). The title Arbiter of Good Taste (arbiter elegantiae) is the Latin term
generally applied to someone who rules on matters of correct taste. This is
probably a reference to Petronius (d. 66 AD), a Roman satirist, who was
appointed arbiter elegantiae in the
court of Nero. [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] I do not dare speak of those happy nations
who do not know even the names of the vices which we have such trouble
controlling, of those American savages whose simple and natural ways of keeping
public order Montaigne does not hesitate to prefer, not merely to the laws of
Plato, but even to anything more perfect which philosophy will ever be able to
dream up for governing a people. He cites a number of striking examples of
these for people who understand how to admire them. What’s more, he says, they
don’t wear breeches! [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] I wish someone would tell me, in good faith,
what opinion the Athenians themselves must have had about eloquence, when they
took so much care to remove it from that honest tribunal against whose
judgments not even the gods appealed. What did the Romans think of medicine
when they banned it from the republic? And when a remnant of humanity persuaded
the Spaniards to forbid their lawyers from entering America, what idea must
they have had of jurisprudence? Could we not say that by this single act they
believed they were repairing all the evils which they had committed against
these unfortunate Indians? [Back to Text]
*The tyrant in Athens is clearly a reference to Peisistratus,
who, in the sixth century BC, apparently began to establish written versions of
Homer’s epics, perhaps in an attempt to provide more or less standardized
copies for use in school. [Back to Text]
*Cato the Elder was Marcus Cato (234-149 BC) a very prominent
Roman soldier, politician, and orator, famous, among other things, for his
attacks on corruption and his emphasis on traditional Roman virtues. [Back to
Text]
*Epicurus (c. 341 to 271 BC) was Greek philosopher who advocated materialistic
explanations of natural events and a hedonistic morality; Zeno is probably a
reference to Zeno of Citium (334 to 262 BC), founder of the Stoic school (this
observation comes from Wayne Martin of the University of Essex); Arcesilas (c.
315 to c. 241 BC) was a Greek skeptical philosopher. Rousseau, Martin notes, is
thus referring to the leaders of the three best known Hellenistic schools of
philosophy: the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Skeptics. [Back to
Text]
*Gaius Fabricius Luscinus was a Roman general and statesman in
the third century BC, famous for his embodiment of the traditional Roman
virtues. Cineas (330 to 270 BC) was a Greek politician from Thessaly. [Back to
Text]
*Louis XII (1462 to 1515) and Henry IV (1553 to 1610) were
strong, successful, and popular kings of France. They fought wars outside of
France and helped to consolidate the kingdom internally. [Back to
Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] It is easy to see the allegory in the
story of Prometheus, and it does not appear that the Greeks who nailed him up
on the Caucasus thought of him any more favourably than the Egyptians did of
their god Teuthus. “The satyr,” says an ancient fable, “wished to embrace and
kiss fire the first time he saw it. But Prometheus cried out at him, ‘Satyr,
you will be lamenting the beard on your chin, for that burns when you touch
it.’” This is the subject of the
frontispiece. [The illustration in the
opening title pages for the Discourse was a picture of Prometheus warning the
satyr]. [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] The less we know, the more we believe we
know. Did the Peripatetics have doubts about anything? Did not Descartes
construct the universe with cubes and vortexes? And is there even today in
Europe a physicist who is so feeble that he does not boldly explain away this
profound mystery of electricity, which will perhaps forever remain the despair
of true philosophers? [Back to Text]
*Sumptuary laws were passed in England and France throughout the
Renaissance to control the purchase of certain goods and thus to restrict and
control the spread of luxury items. [Back to Text]
*A Sybarite is a native of Sybaris and, by reputation, a person
devoted to luxury and luxurious living. A Lacedaemonian is a native of Sparta. [Back to
Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] I am a long way from thinking that this
ascendancy of women is something bad in itself. It is a gift given to them by
nature for the happiness of the human race. Were it better directed, it could
produce as much good as it does evil nowadays. We do not have a sufficient
sense of what advantages would arise in society from a better education
provided for the half of the human race which governs the other half. Men will
always do what women find pleasing. Hence, if you wish men to become great and
virtuous, then teach women what greatness in the soul and virtue are. The
reflections which arise from this subject, something Plato dealt with long ago,
really deserve to be better developed by a pen worthy of following such a
master and of defending such a great cause. [Back to
Text]
*Arouet is the original name of Voltaire (1694-1778), the most
famous philosopher and writer in France in the eighteenth century. [Back to
Text]
*Carle is a reference to Charles-Andre Vanloo, and Pierre a
reference to Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, two well-known French painters.
Praxiteles and Phidias were the two most famous Athenian sculptors of the fifth
century BC. Pigalle (Jean-Baptiste Pigalle) was an eighteenth-century French
sculptor. [Back to Text]
*Hannibal was the great Carthaginian general who in the third
century BC took his army from Spain over the Alps to attack Rome from the
north. He won the major military victories of Cannae and Lake Trasimene. Julius
Caesar led Roman armies in Gaul in the first century BC and expanded Rome’s
empire there. When he brought his troops back across the Rubicon (a river in
north Italy), that was a declaration of war against the Roman senate. [Back to
Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] Pens[ées] Philosoph[iques]. [Back to
Text]
*[Rousseau’s
note] Such was the education of the Spartans,
according to their greatest king. It is, Montaigne states, worth paying
considerable attention to the fact that those excellent regulations of Lycurgus,
which were in truth monstrous in their perfection, were so careful about the
nourishment of children, as if that was their main concern, and in the very
home of the Muses they made so little mention of learning that it is as if
these young people disdained all other yokes and, instead of our teachers of
science, could only be provided with teachers of valour, prudence, and justice.
[Back to Text]
*The “great monarch” is a reference to Louis XIV (1643-1715) who established
a number of learned academies. [Back to Text]
*Leucippus, a fifth-century Greek philosopher, was the founder of
the materialistic school of Atomism; Diagoras was a famous atheistic Greek
philosopher. [Back to Text]
*[Rousseau’s note]
Considering the dreadful disorders which printing has already caused in Europe
and judging the future by the progress which evil makes day by day, we can
readily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to ban
this terrible art from their states as they took to introduce it there. Sultan
Achmet, yielding to the importuning of some alleged men of taste, consented to
establish a printing press in Constantinople. But the press had barely started
before they were forced to destroy it and throw the equipment down a well. They
say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library
of Alexandria, answered as follows: “If the books of this library contain
matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain
only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are
superfluous.” Our learned men have cited
this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great
was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library
would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment
in the life of this illustrious pontiff. [Back to
Text]
*The phrase Consul of Rome is a reference to Cicero, and title
Chancellor of England is a reference to Francis Bacon. [Back to
Text]
*This distinction was commonly made between Athens and Sparta. [Back to
Text]
[Back to johnstonia Home Page]
Page loads on johnstonia web files
View
Stats