Second Part
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 (5). What opinion, then, must the Egyptians themselves have had about the sciences, which were born among them? They could keep a close eye on 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 in 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 feelings, what will be our criterium to judge it properly (6)? 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 eating up 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's 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 arts and sciences, 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, forgetting about the need for Sumptuary Laws,* will philosophy still dare to deny that good customs are essential to the duration of empires and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good customs? 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 limited itself entirely 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 (7), 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 one finds 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 of 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 courage than for strengthening and animating it.

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 (8). 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 (9), 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? The defenders of our 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, collapses, grows sluggish, and dies away in misery and oblivion. That's what, in the long run, must be the result of a preference for agreeable talents rather than useful ones, and that's 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 marvelous 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 compare 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 (10) and the way we use them, the dangerous reveries of Hobbes and Spinoza will remain for ever. 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.*