Educational baggage is composed almost entirely of beliefs. Literature and science are taught like a catechism. Life is the school of prudent doubt. The school is a pretentious church. Every professor is equipped with an arsenal of aphorisms. The youth who refuses to let himself be made a target is despised. The inversion of logical values is carried to the point where certain intellectual acts--resistance to scientific faith, Cartesian reserve--are considered signs of unintelligence. M. Jules de Gaultier has invented a new Manichaeism whose prudent employment will prove very useful in clearing up certain questions.[4] To the vital instinct he opposes the instinct of knowledge; but the former is not the good principle, any more than the latter is the bad principle. They have both their rôle in the work of civilization; for, if the latter develops in man the need to know at the expense of the forces which conserve his vital energy, it permits the intelligence, at the same time, the better to enjoy both itself and the life of the feelings. The spontaneous and unconscious genius of growing races refuses obedience to neither of these great instincts. Life does not exhaust its energy, which is immutable, but the modes of energy which it has assumed. We tire of feeling before we tire of knowing. This is what Leibnitz has naïvely expressed, and what has been repeated with him by all those whose intelligence is the vulture: "It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to think." When this aphorism reaches the people, it means that the decadent vital instinct has begun to give up the struggle. The glorious flowering-time has arrived, but the plant will die once the insect horde has fertilized it and the wind has borne its seed to a virgin soil. An ignorant mass forms a magnificent reserve of life in a people. Our civilization has failed to recognize this. It is an immense field of little flowers which exhausts the earth's vigour for the sake of a senseless effulgence. Such ideas, even in the attenuated form of images, may seem barbarous to those who believe in the "benefits of education"; but it begins to be easier to find adjectives than arguments to regenerate this ancient and almost exhausted theme. Hearing so many journalists and deputies speak of education as a sovereign elixir, it is clear that they have tasted it at the sound, authentic source--that of the handbooks and the encyclopedias--but not from those detestable jars in which the evil genius of analysis slumbers. The true science, the "gay science," is singularly poisonous. It is quite as poisonous as it is salutary. It contains as many doubts as there are specks of gold in Danzig brandy. One never knows just where the intoxication produced by this heady liquor may lead an intelligence not too strong or too sceptical.