3 What is Permissible?

Ill Is IT PERMISSIBLE? They are wrong, it appears! Menander was wrong to elaborate Theophrastus, and Schiller in being guided by Kant. And Kant and La Bruyere, Mommsen and Plutarch and Theophrastus sinned in endeavoring to draw portrait types; Emerson, consequently, was equally in error. For the science of character can have no existence. It should have none our modern pedants having so decreed. "There is no science of the individual," they declare. Nothing can be more pathetic, surely, than the survival in them, so naively expressed, of mediaeval realism. According to all evidence, these folk still believe that there is something else than the individual. They believe, evidently, that the abstract Horse exists independently of this or that horse on earth, and the ideal Hat beyond all hats, taken one by one. Let the reader be reassured. We shall enter upon no argument with these descendants of the Scholastics. For us it suffices that the "Agnes" of Moliere is distinguished clearly enough from Catherine de Medici, for example, that we believe ourselves right in studying separately their respective features. And since they are no more to be confused than are a sprig of parsley and a sprig of hemlock, we have the right to regard them as two physiognomies of a difference which may well be utilized with a view to a classification or arrangement most fecund, and which touches us more closely than any other. To speak plainly, moreover, no classification, even scientific, has reality. It is ingenious, certainly, to have chosen the flower by which to classify botanic species, or the bony structure (instead, this time, of the sex) to distribute those of the animal species who have bones (which have permitted even the least intelligent of them to approximate man, to his great surprise) this is highly ingenious but unassailable. A classification is but a lingo, a catalog analogous to that which, according to the pretty legend, Adam made of the countless varieties of fauna and flora in the Garden of Eden. But Babel has since prevailed, and to its confusion our methods periodically return. Cuvier, although he has not yet constituted the definitive table of zoology, has none the less drawn from his a method more fecund than many of our contemporaries are able to draw from systems stricter yet equally transitory. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that the connoisseur of human souls may, without being taxed with indolence, shrink from the classifications offered concurrently by the various philosophers who have attempted the problem. Shall he adopt the ternary method of Ribot, or shall he fall back, with Fouillee, u;pon the ancient Temperaments, labelled with these new names: Sensitive, of prompt reaction (the Sanguine) ; Sensitive, of intense reaction (the Nervous), etc. which render less humiliating to him, in the universal progress in which we live, this little return to the past? Shall he pretend, with Paulhan, to separate clearly unsound minds from others, the sheep on one side, the goats on the other? Shall he, still stricter, exclude, with Ribot, from all classification the "amorphous" and the "unstable" (the PAPILLONNE of Fourier still disquieting the minds of our philosophers) ? Shall he rather listen to Azan, Le Bon, Perez, Seeland, Payot? He will feel himself, with their treatises in hand, all the more perplexed before Life and its image, Literature, in that these masters, soaring in alcanian spheres, do not in any case deign to cite, in their volumes, more than half a hundred examples. Moreover, these names are always the same; Napoleon alone invariably appears a good fifteen times (despite the contempt for ideologists of this conqueror, so little complex of soul). Can one imagine a course of botany at the end of which the poor student has not heard named more than fifty plants, no more unfamiliar than the cabbage, the rose, the chestnut? He will be little the wiser for having, in compensation, heard abundantly the primary banalities of twenty other sciences! Let us recognize that the scientists have done well to themselves classify the myriad beings with whom their respective realms are occupied, without awaiting the work of the philosophers, and respectfully but firmly to shut the door in their faces. Even as these investigators of visible and ponderable nature have rid themselves of the fanciful so-called Physicists of former times, so today must our scientists of the human heart reject the wouldbe philosopher-psychologists. By ' 'scientists of the human heart" I regret to add that I do not mean the physiologists, whose studies of the nervous system are very interesting, but stop, unfortunately, at a point of view at least as external to our true subject, and consequently as superficial as were, to the future thermo-dynamics, the naive exclamations of the RlG-VEDA. There is no question here of those eternal "faculties of man" in general those imaginary entities nor of laboratory studies whose incertitude with respect to practice exceeds that of meteorology but simply of the Human Heart, which is to say, of precisely that which is most individual in humble man. Anatomists and alcanians will not deign to consider, of course, a thing so small, so trivial, so wretchedly literary. Happily for us, a thousand geniuses have not shared the disdain of these excessive generalizers, and they have devoted themselves to exploring this poor thing, thereby losing, it is true, sometimes their happiness, and, according to the custom of inventors, even their lives. Also, by "scientists of the heart" these must be understood: dramatists, historians, novelists (realist or not), moralists, confessors, lyrists, perspicacious biographers, old epic poets, theologians, casuists, story-tellers. Their innumerable and often minute analyses make of a library, even a limited one, a treasure most extraordinary, this verse of Verlaine or of Sappho, that dialog of Job or of Philoctetes offering more facets, skilfully cut, of the human soul, than have ever been observed in any laboratory. It is only necessary to organize this formidable science, the only one in which all civilizations have labored, and for this purpose, in the first place, to gather all these together and set them in order.