Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

I have seen a writer hesitate to correct his spontaneous composition for fear of marring the tone. He was aware that the state in which he corrected would be quite different from that in which he had written, and in which he had, at the same time, conceived his work. Often a word overheard, an attitude caught sight of, a singular individual passed in the street, gave him the sole suggestion for his tales, which he improvised in three or four hours. If he attempted to follow a preconceived plan, he almost always abandoned it after the first page, and finished his story in accordance with a new logic, reaching a conclusion quite different from that which had seemed best to him when he began. Some of these plans had been drafted under so strong a subconscious influence, that later he no longer understood them, recognized them only by the writing, and was able to determine their date only by the kind of paper he had used, and by the colour of the ink. On the contrary, other projects (for longer works) recurred to him quite frequently. He was conscious of thinking of them several times a day, and was convinced that it was these reveries, even when vague and inconsistent, that rendered the work of execution comparatively easy. In fact, I have never seen him seriously preoccupied with regard to works which were, however, supposed to be the result of a rather arduous effort. He never spoke of them, and I believe firmly that he never gave them a conscious thought till the moment when he wrote the terrible first lines. But, once the work was under way, almost all his intellectual life concentrated on it, the periods of subconscious rumination perpetually returning to join those of voluntary meditation.

As nearly as I have been able to make out, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam had this same method of working. Once an idea had entered his mind – and it sometimes entered quite suddenly, in the course of a conversation most often, for he was a great talker, and profited by everything – this idea, which had come in timidly and silently through the side-door, soon installed itself as if it were at home, and invaded all the reserve spaces of the subconscious. Then, from time to time, it rose to the conscious level, and really obliged Villiers to act under its obsession. At such moments, no matter who was with him, he talked. He talked even when he was alone. Indeed he always talked as if he were alone, when he talked of his idea. I heard thus, fragmentary, several of his last stories, and once when we were seated in front of a café on the boulevard, I had the impression that I was listening to veritable mental wanderings in which this assertion recurred periodically: "There was a cock! There was!" It was only some months later, when Le Chant du Coq appeared, that I understood. He spoke in a low voice, without addressing me. Yet his conscious aim, in thus turning over his ideas aloud, was to attempt to divine their effect upon a hearer. But, little by little, this purpose became obscured. It was the subconscious that was talking in his stead. He worked slowly. There exist five or six superimposed manuscripts of L'Ève Future, and the first differs so much from the last that Edison's name alone serves to link them together. It is often said of a man, who has written little, that he has done little work; but I am convinced that Villiers de l'lsle-Adam never stopped working an instant, even when asleep. In spite of the often absolute blockade that his ideas established about his attention, no mind ever worked more rapidly or was better gifted for conversation. He knew nothing of the twilight moments of awaking. After the fewest hours of sleep, he found himself, at a bound, in full possession of his verve and of his lucidity. Though, he was unquestionably the man of his books, it would, however, be possible to find in him the sketch of a dual personality, in which the conscious and unconscious so overlapped that it would be difficult to disentangle them. It would, on the other hand, be easy to write two lives of Mozart – one on the social individual, the other on the man in his second state, both perfectly legitimate.

Baudelaire used to say: "Inspiration means working every day"; but this aphorism does not appear to epitomize his personal experience. Regular daily work is, so to speak, inspiration regularized, domesticated, enslaved. These terms do not involve a contradiction, for it is certain that the second state can only gain in depth by becoming periodic. Habit, so powerful, reinforces nature to strengthen a psychological state which then comes to be a veritable necessity. Those who depart from a daily routine experience a certain uneasiness both during and after their regular working-hours – sometimes a real distress – especially if they remain in the same surroundings. Remorse has, perhaps, no other origin, whether it be connected with an habitual act which has not been accomplished, or with an act which is not habitual, and which has violently interrupted the customary procession of the days.

If inspiration be a second state, it may, then, be a second state induced voluntarily. There is no doubt that artists, writers, scientists can work without preparation when obliged to, spurred on only by necessity, and that, on the other hand, the work thus produced is quite as good as that done entirely for its own sake. This does not mean that the subconscious has remained inactive during the effort initiated by the will, but that its activity has been induced. There is, then, a subconscious state which is not spontaneous, which comes to mingle with the conscious when required by the will, but which, little by little, as the work progresses, substitutes itself for the will. It is often enough to set to work, in order to feel all the difficulties that had paralyzed effort vanish one by one; but perhaps this reasoning is paralogical, and the work has precisely become possible only because of the preliminary breaking-down of the obstacles which had confronted the mind in the first place. In either case, however, there is evident intervention of the subconscious forces.

How does a sensation become an image, the image an idea? How does the idea develop? How does it assume the form which seems best to us? How, in writing, is contribution levied upon the verbal memory? These are all questions which seem to me insoluble, yet whose solution would be necessary in order to formulate a precise definition of inspiration. "Neither reflection nor will-power can take the place of inspiration for the purpose of original creation," writes M. Ribot.50 No doubt; but reflection and force of will may nevertheless have their rôle in the evolution of this mysterious phenomenon, and then, too; on the other hand, cases of pure intellectual automatism are rather rare. It must doubtless be supposed that those who are capable of experiencing the happy influence of inspiration, are also those most capable of feeling with force and with frequency the shocks of the external world. Imaginatives are also sensitives. Their brain reserves must be very rich in elements. This supposes a constant supply of sensations, as well as a very lively sensibility and an incessantly renewed capacity for feeling. This sensibility, too, belongs, in large part, to the domain of the subconscious. There are, according to Leibnitz's expression, "thoughts which our soul does not perceive." There are also sensations which our senses do not perceive, and it is perhaps these sensations which leave our brain as they entered it – subconsciously. The most fruitful observations are those which we make without knowing it. To live without thinking of life is often the best means for coming to know life. After half a century and more, a man sees the surroundings, the scenes, and the events of his unreflecting childhood rise before him. As a child, he had dwelt in the external world as in an extension of himself, with a purely physiological concern. He had seen without seeing. Yet now, while the middle distance remains veiled in mist, it is this period of his most fleeting impressions that returns and takes on life before his eyes. It is very evident that the sensation, which has entered us without our being aware of it, can never, at any moment, be voluntarily evoked; but the conscious sensation, on the contrary, can return suddenly, without any assistance from the will. The subconscious has, then, dominion over two orders of sensations, whereas consciousness has but one at its disposal. This may explain why will and reflection have so restricted a share in the creations of literature and of art.

But what is their rôle in the rest of life?

In principle, man is an automaton, and it would seem that in him consciousness is an acquisition, an added faculty. Let us not be deceived. Because man walks, acts, talks, he is not necessarily conscious, nor is he ever completely conscious. Consciousness, if we take the word in its precise, absolute sense, is without doubt the possession of the few. In crowds men become particularly automatic. Indeed, their very instinct to herd together, to do all of them the same thing at the same time, is unmistakable evidence as to the nature of their intelligence. How can we suppose consciousness and will to exist in the members of those dense throngs which, on days of festivals or during disorders, move forward in a mass toward the same point, with the same cries and the same gestures? They are ants, that come out from under the blades of grass after a rain, and nothing more. The conscious man, who mingles without reflection in the crowd, who acts as the crowd acts, loses his personality. He is now merely one of the tentacles of the great artificial octopus, and almost all his sensations die away in the collective brain of the hypothetical animal. From this contact he will bring back next to nothing. The man who comes out of the crowd, like the man saved from drowning, has one recollection only – that of having fallen into the water.

It is among the small number of the conscious élite that must be sought the veritably superior examples of a humanity of which they are, not the leaders – that would be a pity, and too contrary to instinct – but the judges. However – and this is a subject for serious meditation – these individuals, raised above the rest, attain their full power only at moments when the conscious, becoming subconscious, opens the locks of the brain and lets the renewed floods of sensation rush back to the world whence they were derived. They are magnificent instruments on which the subconscious alone plays with genius, for it, too, is subconscious. Goethe is the type of these dual men, and the supreme hero of intellectual humanity.

There are other men, not less rare, but less complete, in whom the will plays but a very ordinary rôle, and who are nothing the moment they cease to be under the influence of the subconscious. Their genius is often only the purer and more energetic because of this. They are more docile instruments under the breath of the unknown God. But, like Mozart, they do not know what they do. They obey an irresistible force. That is why Gluck had his piano moved out into the middle of a meadow, in the full sunlight. That is why Haydn gazed at a ring, why Crébillon lived surrounded by dogs, why Schiller frequently inhaled the odour of rotten apples with which he had filled the drawer of his table. Such are the most innocent fantasies of the subconscious. There are others that are both more insistent and more terrible.

THE ROOTS OF IDEALISM

I

Since writing, in Physique de l'Amour, the chapter on "The Tyranny of the Nervous System," with its criticism of Lamarck's saying, "the environment creates the organ," I have come to conceive some doubts on the legitimacy of my ideas. I am going to state them without definitely taking sides either against myself or against subjective idealism, to which in the last analysis I remain in large part faithful.

Idealism is to-day the dominant doctrine in philosophy, which was bound to come to it, after a period of raillery, for reasoning leads to it invincibly.

We know that there are two idealisms. It is then prudent, whenever this word is employed in a context not purely philosophic, to define it. There are two idealisms, both qualified by a word which is identical in form, but different in meaning, since one comes from ideal, the other from idea. The former is the expression of a moral or religious state of mind. It is very nearly synonymous with spiritualism, and it is this that M. Brunetière employs when that hard-hearted man becomes sentimental on the subject of the "renaissance of idealism." There is a certain "Revue Idéaliste," marked by a serene religious sentiment, which belongs to the same clan, and in which it would be a mistake to seek any enlightenment on Berkeley's doctrine.

The other idealism, which it would have been better to call ideaism, and which Nietzsche has carried to the point of phenomenalism, is a philosophical conception of the world. Schopenhauer, who was not its inventor, has provided it with its best formula – the world is my representation. That is to say, the world is such as it appears to me. If it has a real existence in itself, it is inaccessible to me. It is that which I see it, or feel it, to be.

Schopenhauer's formula withstands every criticism. It is irrefutable. The doctrine which derives from it, if attacked directly, presents itself as an impregnable fortress. Every reasoning blunts itself impotently against it. It has this remarkable quality, that it is as valid for the sensation, for the sentiment, as for the idea. There may be based upon it equally, at will, a theory of intelligence, like Taine's, or a theory of sensibility – something which has not been yet attempted. Take the hackneyed statement that the same painful event does not affect with the same intensity two persons whom it strikes with the same external force. That is idealism. Take the subject of tastes and of colours (in which Nietzsche found so much amusement). There too, we have idealism. Whenever we study life, facts, intelligences, physiologies, sensibilities for the purpose of finding, not resemblances, but differences, we are practising idealism. While there is life, there is idealism. That is to say, there are, according to the species, or even the individual, different ways of reacting against an external or internal sensation. Everything is merely representation, for a bird as well as for a man, for a crab as for a cuttle-fish. Reality is relative. A woman, a nervous man even, can suffer intensely – perhaps lose consciousness – by imagining the amputation of a leg, the scraping of the bones. Hardened soldiers, on the contrary, have undergone such operations without flinching. A particular taste for cruelty should not be attributed to the civilizations which countenanced torture, and to those which still practise it. The refinements which the Chinese bring to physical punishment are nothing but a very clear indication of insensibility. That which agonizes a European makes a yellow man smile. But there are, among men of the same social group, numerous degrees of sensibility. Pain, like pleasure, is a representation. The formula has been extended to groups. A people is what it believes itself to be, very much more than what it actually is. Most social disorders are merely collective representations.

But it is difficult to explain idealism by an examination of the facts of sensibility. They are too well known, too generally admitted, to support a philosophic construction. A point of departure more extraordinary and less easy to understand is needed. The phenomenon of vision is generally employed in this connection. It seems simple, but, when analyzed, it is exceedingly mysterious.

Seeing is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, what do we see, when we see a tree? A tree, to be sure, but not the tree itself. What enters us, as object perceived, is not the tree as tree, but the tree as image. What is the image worth? Is it exact?

So it may be supposed, since it is sensibly the same for the various persons who perceive it, and since divergences of appreciation begin only when there come into play judgments conditioned by sentiment or interest. This supposed exactitude is, in any case, very relative. An image is an image, a photograph, and it differs from the reality-tree (pure hypothesis) as much as a round, long, branching, leafy object differs from a graphic representation, without thickness. It is true that tactile sensation, or its memory, comes then to our aid, adding to the tenuousness of the visual image the idea of consistence, of resistance, without which we have difficulty in conceiving matter. We can then – and thanks also to our observation of the opposing play of light and shade – give this vain image its true position in space.

But however complete and concordant may be the actions of our senses, when it is a question of knowing an object – even when, as in sexual love, the six senses, including the genital sense, come into play simultaneously – it is none the less the fact that the object known remains exterior to ourselves. Besides, this qualification "known" is little appropriate to the object perceived, since it has an interior face, inaccessible at first glance to our senses. If we are dealing with a living being – and all the more if this being be intelligent and complex – we must exercise all sorts of faculties and devote ourselves to minute analyses in order to arrive, even then, at a knowledge that is very nearly illusory.

Knowledge arrives, then, at a certain bankruptcy. It is not very far from this point to that of proclaiming the uselessness of the external world as a means of explaining the nature of knowledge itself. It is only a step from uselessness to reality. The idealistic philosophers who develop their theory to its logical conclusion, can say, without paradox, that everything occurs in vision, for example, as if the object did not exist – as if intelligence, though believing that it receives aid from the eye, in reality created this object just as far as it wishes to know it. The phenomenon of hallucinations gives an appearance of reason to these exasperated idealists. Did not Taine, who was not exasperated, call sensation a true hallucination? But why true? That is a word which, in the circumstances, it is difficult to justify. It would be juster to say that hereditary habit inclines us to regard certain sensations as true, certain others as false. Perhaps utility serves us also as guide, and we imagine, in order to reassure ourselves, an external and fallacious world whose operations correspond to the movements of our psychology.

II

There is another way of knowing, at once more elementary, more intimate, and more uncertain. This is absorption. The elements of our nourishment, in proportion as we "know" them, disintegrate, yield soluble parts to our organism, and reject the rest in a form equally unknowable. If we reject, as we should, the primitive distinction between soul and body, admitting only the body and believing everything to be physical, then this way of knowing should be studied parallel with those ways which spring from each of our different senses, or from their collaboration. It is certain that absorption has taught man in every age. It is through it, and not by virtue of an unknown instinct, that he has succeeded in separating vegetables and animals into good and bad, into useful and harmful or indifferent. Our analytical methods are still unable, save perhaps in particularly expert hands, to distinguish mushrooms as a harmful or favourable form of nourishment. The expert himself must be guided, for this delicate operation, by a direct and real experiment of absorption. Man, devoid of science, took himself as laboratory. None was surer. He acquired, by this means, certain parts of his knowledge which have proved most useful to humanity and to the domestic animals. From time to time medications are rediscovered which figure in ancient pharmacopeias. Thus formate of lime or of soda, recently prescribed as a muscular invigorant, contains scarcely a principle that did not figure in the old "water of magnanimity," obtained by maceration and distillation of a certain quantity of ants. How did our ancestors, who were no doubt shepherds and labourers, come to distinguish the virtue of ants? Evidently by eating them. The foul Arabs and other low forms of humanity who eat their vermin, find in them, perhaps, an analogous tonic. This practice, like all those which resolve themselves into absorption, is assuredly dictated by experience. Neither a man nor an animal can, in principle, become addicted to an act which is harmful to him. Between acts that are harmful, and acts that are salutary, there is a whole series of games, but it is difficult to admit that a daily game is a harmful act.

Why do not peasants eat certain abundant rodents? It is easy to answer by offering taste and disgust as pretexts; but this is reversing the logical order of the terms of the argument.

A food does not disgust by its odour. The odour of a food disgusts because this food is harmful or useless. To understand this, without the necessity of insisting upon it, it is enough to think of all those foods with nauseous odours, which we appreciate much more than those which might be considered pleasant. Such is the fruit of experience, that is to say, of knowledge.

I believe that absorption should be considered one of the best means we have of appreciating the practical value of certain parts of the external world. Agriculture, kitchen-gardening, cooking, pharmacy almost entirely, are born of it. Assuredly men, even the rarest chemists and physiologists, could suck a kola-nut for years, without suspecting those virtues that savages found quite simply by cracking it with their teeth.

They jest who, ignoring not only the importance but the very existence of this sixth or seventh or tenth sense, attribute to taste or to smell a mysterious power of divining the harmfulness of a plant or of its fruit. How can they help seeing immediately that this preservative instinct, if it be hereditary, has had a beginning, and that, at this beginning, there was a fact of knowledge? The traditional notion of instinct must be left in the old theological and spiritualistic repertories. It serves simple people as an easy means of distinguishing man from the animals. Animals have instinct, man has intelligence. There are proofs. Man poisons himself with mushrooms, frugivorous animals never. What man? Not the traditional peasant surely. Only the déraciné or the city-dweller, who has naturally lost an instinct which was useless to him. This proof proves only that it is dangerous for man, as for the other animals, or for plaints themselves, to change their habitat. There is a painful, uncertain transitory phase. It is during this phase that we go into the woods, picknicking, and gather toadstools. But rabbits in cages, when given wet grass or vegetables instinctively unknown to them, allow themselves to be completely poisoned. Free, it would never have occurred to them to crop at dewfall, because their ancestors, dwelling in extremely thick woodlands, were ignorant of the very existence of the dew, and transmitted distrust of wet grass to their offspring.

Man, even in the state of semi-civilization, is burdened with too much knowledge for it all to be transmitted hereditarily; but there is no doubt that the oldest and most useful reaches us in this manner. When we walk in the forest there are berries that tempt us, whortleberries, for example, but never alderberries. Who has taught us (I am supposing a real ignorance), that they are purgative and even dangerous? Instinct? What is instinct? The hereditary transmission of knowledge.

This transmission can, without doubt, occur in the case of abstract ideas, as well as of practical ideas – that is to say, useful for the conservation of life. Some, besides, are really useful, and even primordial. It is as reasonable to believe that they are inherited as to suppose them personally acquired. It might be possible to rehabilitate the theory of innate ideas, by revising it carefully and eliminating from its catalogue all sorts of Platonic or Christian inventions, too recent to have entered our blood.

As to the direct knowledge of ideas, this is gained in a form sensibly analogous to the knowledge of matter by absorption. Once they have entered us, ideas either remain inert, unknown, or else are disintegrated. In the first case, it is not long before they are expelled from the brain, much like an indigestible morsel which has entered the intestines. Their stay may produce a certain irritation, even lesions. That is to say, it may provoke absurd acts, manifestly without logical relation to the normal physiology of the patient. This effect may be observed in all countries, but especially in France, at the time of great political or moral crises. We see people tormented by the presence of a parasitic idea in their brain, like sheep by the residence of a trumpet-fly's egg in their frontal sinus. Man, like the sheep, has the "itch." That ends badly for the sheep – for the man also, very often.