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.