For all these teachers teach desperately the negation of life. They infect the healthy section of the people with their own unhealthy habits of receiving sensation only by reflex, of watching in a glass the life they dare not encounter, and they do so with a certain good faith. The real object of this education is the implanting of a morality--a singular morality, whose precepts are almost entirely negative. By weakening the will to live, to the profit of an instable cerebrality, they fashion those enervated, obedient, docile generations which are the dream of second-rate tyrants. At the very moment when a race needs, merely to persist, all the forces of which its instinct is perhaps still the depository, they pour out for it, though in an impoverished, poisoned form, that very liquor with which the Roman apostles tamed the surplus energy of the barbarians. If a rationalistic or religious protestantism were to pre-empt the sovereign place of our traditional, pagan Catholicism, we should share the fate of those conquered peoples. But how is it possible not to be tempted to furnish rules of conduct along with rules of grammar? All we ask is that these precepts should not be depressants, but that the young should find in them, on the contrary, an incitement to activity--to all the activities. Education, in itself, is nothing. It can be judged only when its surroundings are examined by the light of this torch. A torch is useful, not because of its light, but because of the object on which its light falls. We see also an oven methodically heated with brushwood and faggots; but this heat is merely a sterile blaze if, when it dies down, the dough of the eternal bread be not given it to bake.