Teaching, from top to bottom--from the official to the popular universities, from the village school to the École Normale--is little else than a phrase-factory. The most valuable of all is the primary school, where one learns to read and write--acquisitions, not of a science, but of a new sense. If there were cut from the programme of the rest everything useless--everything inapplicable to life or to some profession or trade--scarcely enough would be left for eighteen months' schooling. The greater part of the people still escape the tortures of listening to gentlemen who recite books. The children of the poor, freed from the scholastic prison, learn a trade, which is an enhancement of one's self, and begin to live at an age when their rich brothers still spend their time handling words which correspond to nothing real--tools which sculpture the eternal void.[3] This is about to be remedied, and here is the subject of a night lecture in a people's university: "The Development of the Idea of Justice in Antiquity." Even supposing--what is little likely--that the professor said nothing on this subject that could not be absorbed by a healthy intelligence, of what use could such a discourse possibly be to a popular audience, and what could such an audience derive from it applicable to its own humble existence? Less, assuredly, than from the old-fashioned sermons which were not afraid to flout its vices and to play upon its cowardice to keep it from low pleasures. But the clergy of the lay religion is grave and disdainful of facts. Souls speak to souls. The ideal descends upon the people. The first Christians at least met both to pray and to eat in fraternal union. After the repast, some arose to utter prophecies. The modern prophets live only on abstractions, and they gladly share this economical and ridiculous food with their brethren. The man who has slowly acquired a science, has, aside from the social advantages which it offers him, conferred, by that very fact, a special force and agility upon his organs of attention. He possesses not only the desired science, but a whole hunting outfit in good condition, and all ready for new quarry. When he has carefully and patiently acquired a foreign language, he can afterwards, with far less effort, master the other languages of the same family. But, if he has had recourse to some time-saving method, the acquisition no longer possesses its proper value, and may even deteriorate more or less rapidly. Water, boiled very quickly, grows cold equally fast--a fact ignored by the manufacturer who had set up public boilers. By the time it had crossed the street, the water was as cold as if it had come from a cool spring. It is for this same reason that quick teaching by the lecture system is so particularly useless. The listener learns to believe and not to reason, which would still be a way of acting and of living.