Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on the Arts and Sciences ..., Study notes of Celebrity

Download Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on the Arts and Sciences ... and more Study notes Celebrity in PDF only on Docsity! Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on the Arts and Sciences [The First Discourse] 1750 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* Preliminary Notice 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 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 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 rests 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 clever 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 freethinker 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. Discourse 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 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 finds 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 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. One does not dare to appear as what one is. 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 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 (2) 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 conclude 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 lights have 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 the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and finally 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 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 fell 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's what makes up the fabric of the history of Constantinople; that's 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 knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be—what I was or what they were, 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 orators, nor the artists, nor I—what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. 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 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 and 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 vain pomp or by 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 your arts could 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 was 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 we were not destined 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 the misfortune of being born knowledgeable. How humiliating these reflections are for humanity! How our pride must be mortified! 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. 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— 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 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 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 those who understand how to admire them. What's more, he says, they don't wear breeches! [Back to Text] (4) 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] (5) 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.* [Back to Text] (6) The less we know, the more we believe we know. Did the Peripatetics have doubts about anything? Didn't 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] (7) 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] (8) Pens[ées] Philosoph[iques]. [Back to Text] (9) Such was the education of the Spartans, according to their greatest king. It is, Montaigne states, something worthy of great consideration that those excellent regulations of Lycurgus, which were in truth incredibly perfect, paid so much care to 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. Now let us see how the same author speaks of the ancient Persians. Plato, he says, states that the eldest son in their royal succession was nurtured in the following manner: After his birth, they gave him, not to women, but to the eunuchs who, because of their virtue, had the closest influence on the king. These took charge of making his body handsome and healthy, and at seven years of age they taught him to ride a horse and to hunt. When he reached fourteen years of age, they put him in the hands of four men: the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and the most valiant in the nation. The first would teach him religion, the second always to be truthful, the third to overcome his cupidity, and the fourth to fear nothing. All, I will add, were to make him good, none to make him learned. Astyges, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus to tell him about his last lesson. It's this, he says: in our school a large boy with a small tunic gave it to one of his shorter companions and took his tunic, which was larger. Our tutor made me the judge of this disagreement, and I judged that one should leave matters as they were, since both of them seemed better off that way. At that he remonstrated with me, saying I had done badly, for I had stopped to take convenience into account, when it was necessary first to provide for justice, which does not want anyone to be forced in matters concerning what belongs to him. And he says that he was punished for it, just as people punish us in our villages for having forgotten the first aorist of τύπτω. My teacher would have to give me a splendid harangue, in genere demonstrativo [in the style of a formal presentation], before he persuaded me that his school was as good as that one. [Back to Text] (10) 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] Translator's Notes *Ovid: The Latin sentence translates as follows: "In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me." [Back to Text] *. . . even more undeserved: This Preliminary Notice was not in the original discourse. When he was preparing a collected edition of his work in 1763, Rousseau added this opening paragraph. The * . . . of the frontispiece: The illustration in the opening title pages for the Discourse was a picture of Prometheus warning the satyr. [Back to Text] * . . . Sumptuary Laws: Sumptuary laws were passed in England and France throughout the Renaissance to control the purchase and display of certain goods and thus to restrict and control the spread of luxury items. [Back to Text] * . . . thirty Lacedaemonians: 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] * . . . has cost you: Arouet is the original name of Voltaire (1694- 1778), the most famous philosopher and writer in France in the eighteenth century. [Back to Text] * . . . to remain idle: 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] * . . . your ancestors: 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] * . . . they admit: The "great monarch" is Louis XIV (1643-1715) who established a number of learned academies. [Back to Text] * . . . perished with them: 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] * . . . Chancellor of England: the Consul of Rome is a reference to Cicero, and the Chancellor of England is a reference to Francis Bacon. [Back to Text] * . . . to act well: This distinction was commonly made between Athens and Sparta. [Back to Text]