“There is one universal profession:—to be a man,” says Guyau. And Renan, remembering à propos of unbalanced and imperfect civilizations, that the end of the human creature cannot be only either to know or to feel or to imagine, but to be entirely and really human, defines the ideal of perfection to which he should bend his energies, as the possibility of offering in the individual type an abbreviated picture of the whole race.

Try, then, to develop so far as possible not any single aspect, but the plenitude of your being. Shrug not your shoulders before any noble and fecund manifestation of human nature, under the pretext that your own individuality ties you of preference to a different one. Be attentive spectators where you may not be actors. When that false and vulgarized idea of education, which thinks it subordinate wholly to utilitarian ends, takes upon itself to mutilate by such materialism the natural fulness of our minds, and by a premature specialization to proscribe the teaching of anything that is disinterested or ideal, it fails to avoid the danger of training for the future minds that have become narrow, incapable of seeing more than the one aspect of a thing which immediately touches them, separated as by a frozen desert from other minds that in the same society have chosen other aspects of our life. The necessity of devoting ourselves each one to some determined activity, some special form of learning, surely need not exclude the inclination to realize, for the intimate harmony of our spirit, that destiny which is common to all rational beings. That special activity must be but the basic note of that harmony. The famous line in which the slave of the old play affirmed that nothing human was strange to him, being human himself, forms part of that cry of the heart which is eternal in the human consciousness because its meaning is inexhaustible. Our capacity to understand must only be limited by the impossibility of understanding souls that are narrow. To be unable to see more than one phase of nature, more than one human interest or idea, is like living in the shadow of a dream pierced by a single ray of sunlight. That intolerance, that exclusiveness, which when bom of tyrannous absorption in some high enthusiasm or flowing from some disinterested ideal may merit justification or even sympathy, becomes converted to the most abominable of inferiorities when in the circle of vulgar life it betrays the narrowness of a mind incapacitated to reflect on more than the partial appearances of things.

Unfortunately, in the very times when civilization reaches its highest level of culture is the danger of this limitation of minds most serious and its results most to be feared. For the law of evolution requires, as it appears in societies as well as individuals, an ever-increasing tendency to heterogeneity, which as the general cul- ture of society increases limits individual activities more and more and restricts the field of action of each one to an ever' narrower specialty. And though it be a necessary condition of progress, this development of the notion of specialization brings with it visible evils which not only lower the horizon of the eye of thought, thus distorting its image of the universe, but come to injure also the spirit of human solidarity by the particularization of individual habits and affections. Auguste Comte well noted this peril of advanced civilizations. A high state of social perfection had for him serious inconvenience in that it facilitated the appearance of narrow and bounded minds; of brains “very efficient under one aspect and monstrously inept under all others." The belittling of the human brain by continual exercise of one mode of activity is compared by Comte to the miserable lot of a labourer who by the division of labour is condemned in a factory to devote all the energies of his being to the invariable repetition of a single mechanical detail. In each case the moral result is to inspire him with a disastrous indifference to the general interests of humanity. And although this sort of human automatism does not, says the positivist, occur save under the extreme dispersive influence of the principle of specialization, its actual existence, already frequent, requires that we should give serious consideration to its importance.

This dispersive influence injures the beauty of our institutions no less than their strength. The incomparable beauty of Athens, the imperishable pattern left to humanity of all that is admirable and enchanting by her divine hand, lies in that that city of prodigies founded its idea of life on the concert of all human faculties, in the free and chartered liberty of all energies capable of contributing to the glory or the power of mankind! For Athens alone could exalt at once the feeling for ideal with the real, reason with instinct, the forces of the body with those of the spirit. It chiselled clear the four sides to the soul. Every free Athenian draws, as it were, a circle about him to contain his activities, a perfect circle in which no unordered impulse shatters the graceful proportion of the line. He is athlete and living sculpture in the gymnasium, citizen on the Pnyx, polemic and thinker in the porticoes. He exerts his will in every virile action and his thought in any fertile task. Therefore averred Macaulay that a day in the public life of Athens comprised a more brilliant programme of instruction than any we now plan in our modem centres of education. And from that one free blooming of the fulness of our nature rose the miracle of Greece—an inimitable, enchanting mingling of animation and serenity, a springtime of the human spirit, a smile of history.

In our times the growing complexity of our civilization would make unserious the thought of restoring this harmony, which is only possible with elements of a gracious simplicity. But within that very complexity of our culture, that progressive differentiation of our characters, our aptitudes, our merits, which is the unavoidable consequence of a progress in social evolution, it behooves us to preserve a reasonable share for all in certain basic ideas or feelings which alone keep up the unity and concert of human life—in certain interests of the soul for which the dignity of the rational being suffers no indifference in any of us. When the sense of material utility and comfort dominates societies with the energy now shown, the results of narrow minds and one-sided culture are especially fatal to the growth of purely ideal occupations. From being an object of love to those who nobly and perseveringly cherish them, they change to an unknown land, an unexplored region, whose very existence is unsuspected by an immense multitude of the others. Any sort of disinterested thought, of ideal contemplation, of inward truce, to which the daily newspaper yields for a moment its dominion, for one glance that is noble and calm direct from the heights of reason to things as they are, will thus remain, in the actual state of our society, unknown to millions of minds, minds “educated” and “civilized,” who are by our education and customs reduced to the automatism of an activity that is definitively material. And more: that kind of servitude should be held by us the very saddest and lowest of all the moral conditions we condemn. And I demand of you that in the battle of life you defend your souls against that mutilation of them by the tyranny of a single and self-interested object.