Education is a means, and not an end. It is painfully absurd to learn for learning's sake, to burn for the sake of burning. The very song of the birds is not in vain. During the periods of sexual calm the great love concerts are rehearsed. Considered as the precise instrument of a future work, education may have a very great, even absolute importance. It may be the necessary condition of certain intellectual achievements. It will be the staff of the intelligence; but, offered to a second-rate brain, directed simply and solely to the enlargement of the memory, it has no power to regenerate sick cells. It will rather serve to crush them. It will make them dull. It will divert from the natural needs of life the activities merely meant for daily exercise. Education ballasts unstable genius, giving it subjects for comparison and motives for reflection. To genius already established, it affords a little of that uneasiness which is the source of irony. It is sometimes a support for certitude, sometimes the cause of gravitation towards doubt. But it has an influence only upon intelligences in action or capable of action. It does not determine, it inclines. Above all, it does not create intelligence. We are constantly offered examples of men who, educated in all that is taught, remain mediocrities, and who, though they have written for twenty years, have not even learned how to write. And, on the other hand, there are others who know but one trade, and who have read nothing but life. Their lucidity sometimes shames even genius. 1900. [1] "A work," continues the translator, "which can profit the reader, and which brings marvellous contentment to those who frequent the courts of the _grands seigneurs_, and who wish to learn how to talk of an infinite number of things opposed to the common opinion." S. 1. 1603. [2] _L'Appel au soldat_. [3] Someone remarked in the course of a conversation: "The peasant is a real person; he is a scientist, a physicist." All modern political effort tends to turn the physicist into a metaphysician. This effort is well under way for the working-man, who begins to despise toil and value phrases. His surprise is great when he finds that the word has no effect upon reality. [4] _De Kant à Nietzsche_. WOMEN AND LANGUAGE