the guardianship of their thoughts.  And if it happens that nobler necessities agitate their soul, they cling with a greedy faith to the formulas that the state and the church hold in reserve for such cases.  If these unhappy men deserve our compassion, those others deserve our just contempt, who, though set free from those necessities by more fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke.  These latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas; where the feelings have more intensity, and the imagination can at will create convenient chimeras, to the rays of truth which put to flight the pleasant illusions of their dreams.  They have founded the whole structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight.  It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom:  a truth that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name. [Footnote:  The Greek word means, as is known, love of wisdom.]

It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character; to a certain extent it is from the character that this light proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass through the heart.  Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence.

LETTER IX.

But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning?  Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical culture, and yet the latter must be the condition of the former.  All improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling of the character.  But, subject to the influence of a social constitution still barbarous, how can character become ennobled?  It would then be necessary to seek for this end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.

I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended that have engaged me up to the present time.  This instrument is the art of the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal models.

Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the arbitrary will of men.  The political legislator may place their empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there.  He can proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he cannot change art.  No doubt, nothing is more common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of the age, and creative