y dreamt of so ardently, had for its
indispensable condition the aesthetic life and the universal propagation
of the religion of truth and beauty. The latter assumes the drastic
lopping off of numerous personal wants. Consequently in rushing, as they
did, into an exaggerated development of commercial life, they were
marching in the opposite direction to their own goal.

They must have begun, I am well aware, by uprooting the fatal habit of
eating bread, which made man a slave to the tyrannical whims of a plant,
of beasts which were necessary for the manuring of this plant, and of
other plants which served as fodder for their beasts.... But as long as
this unhappy craving was rampant and they refrained from combating it,
it was obligatory to abstain from arousing others which were not less
anti-social, that is to say, not less natural. It was far better to
leave men at the ploughtail than to attract them to the factory, for the
dispersion and isolation of individualist types are more preferable to
bringing them together, which can only result in setting them by the
ears. But let us hurry on. All the advantages for which we are indebted
to our anti-natural position are now clear. We alone have realised all
the quintessence of refinement and reality, of strength and of
sweetness, that the social life contains. Formerly, here and there, in a
few rare cases in the midst of deserts an individual had certainly had a
distant foretaste of this ineffable thing, not to mention three or four
salons in the eighteenth century under the ancient regime, two or three
painters' studios, one or two green-rooms. They represented, in a way,
imperceptible cores of social protoplasm lost amid a mass of foreign
matter. But this marrow has become the entire bone at present. Our
cities, all in all, are one vast workshop, household and reception hall.
And this has happened in the simplest and most inevitable manner in the
world. Following the law of separation of the old Herbert Spencer, the
selection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place
of its own accord. In fact, at the end of a century there was already
underground in course of development and continuous excavation a city of
painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians, of poets, of
geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of
psychologists, of scientific or aesthetic specialists of every kind,
except, strictly speaking, in philosophy. For w