The Simple Life | Page 3

makes them grow and multiply
so well that they become stronger than he; and once their slave, he
loses his moral sense, loses his energy, and becomes incapable of
discerning and practicing the good. He has surrendered himself to the
inner anarchy of desire, which in the end gives birth to outer anarchy.
In the moral life we govern ourselves. In the immoral life we are

governed by our needs and passions. Thus little by little, the bases of
the moral life shift, and the law of judgment deviates.
For the man enslaved to numerous and exacting needs, possession is
the supreme good and the source of all other good things. It is true that
in the fierce struggle for possession, we come to hate those who
possess, and to deny the right of property when this right is in the hands
of others and not in our own. But the bitterness of attack against others'
possessions is only a new proof of the extraordinary importance we
attach to possession itself. In the end, people and things come to be
estimated at their selling price, or according to the profit to be drawn
from them. What brings nothing is worth nothing: he who has nothing,
is nothing. Honest poverty risks passing for shame, and lucre, however
filthy, is not greatly put to it to be accounted for merit.
Some one objects: "Then you make wholesale condemnation of
progress, and would lead us back to the good old times--to asceticism
perhaps."
Not at all. The desire to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful and
dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not
consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one
of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to
find a remedy for it--namely, the belief that man becomes happier and
better by the increase of outward well-being. Nothing is falser than this
pretended social axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity
without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases
character, is a fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The
worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this
man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes bad worse, and further
embroils social problems.
[A] The author refers to the unparalleled bitterness of the conflict in
France between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.
* * * * *
This principle may be verified in other domains than that of material

well-being. We shall speak only of education and liberty. We
remember when prophets in good repute announced that to transform
this wicked world into an abode fit for the gods, all that was needed
was the overthrow of tyranny, ignorance, and want--those three dread
powers so long in league. To-day, other preachers proclaim the same
gospel. We have seen that the unquestionable diminution of want has
made man neither better nor happier. Has this desirable result been
more nearly attained through the great care bestowed upon instruction?
It does not yet appear so, and this failure is the despair of our national
educators.
Then shall we stop the people's ears, suppress public instruction, close
the schools? By no means. But education, like the mass of our age's
inventions, is after all only a tool; everything depends upon the
workman who uses it.... So it is with liberty. It is fatal or lifegiving
according to the use made of it. Is it liberty still, when it is the
prerogative of criminals or heedless blunderers? Liberty is an
atmosphere of the higher life, and it is only by a slow and patient
inward transformation that one becomes capable of breathing it.
All life must have its law, the life of man so much the more than that of
inferior beings, in that it is more precious and of nicer adjustment. This
law for man is in the first place an external law, but it may become an
internal law. When man has once recognized the inner law, and bowed
before it, through this reverence and voluntary submission he is ripe for
liberty: so long as there is no vigorous and sovereign inner law, he is
incapable of breathing its air; for he will be drunken with it, maddened,
morally slain. The man who guides his life by inner law, can no more
live servile to outward authority than can the full-grown bird live
imprisoned in the eggshell. But the man who has not yet attained to
governing himself can no more live under the law of liberty than can
the unfledged bird live without its protective covering. These things are
terribly simple, and the series of demonstrations old and new that
proves them, increases daily under our eyes. And yet we