The Mediocre Man E-Book

José Ingenieros

• Herausgeber: Aroha
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Mediocre Man by José Ingenieros This philosophical essay explores the contrast between mediocrity and greatness in human character. Ingenieros critiques conformity, intellectual stagnation, and lack of ambition, advocating for personal growth, creativity, and the pursuit of excellence to elevate both individual and societal progress.

Leseprobe

THE MEDIOCRE MAN

JOSÉ INGENIEROS

INTRODUCTION

THE MORALITY OF THE IDEALISTS.

I. The Emotion of the Ideal - II. Of an idealism founded on experience. - III. Idealistic temperaments. - IV. Romantic Idealism. -

V. Stoic Idealism. - VI. Symbolism.

THE EMOTION OF THE

IDEAL

When you set your visionary bow towards a star and tend your wing towards such ungraspable excellence, eager for perfection and rebellious against mediocrity, you carry within you the mysterious spring of an Ideal. It is a sacred ember, capable of tempering you for great deeds. Custody it; if you let it die out, it will never be rekindled. And if it dies in you, you remain inert: cold human swill. You live only for that particle of reverie that puts you above the real. She is the lis of your coat of arms, the plume of your temperament. Countless signs reveal her: when your throat is knotted when you remember the hemlock imposed on Socrates, the cross hoisted for Christ and the bonfire lit for Bruno; -when you abstract yourself in the infinite reading a dialogue of Plato, an essay of Montaigne or a discourse of Helve- cio; -when your heart trembles thinking of the unequal fortune of those passions in which you were, alternatively, the Romeo of such a Ju- lieta and the Werther of such a Carlota; -when your temples shudder thinking of the unequal fortune of those passions in which you were, alternatively, the Romeo of such a Ju- lieta and the Werther of such a Carlota; -when your temples freeze with emotion as you declaim a stanza of Musset that rhymes with your feelings; and when, in short, you admire the precluding mind of the geniuses, the sublime virtue of the saints, the great deeds of the heroes, bowing with equal veneration before the creators of Truth or Beauty.

They do not, as you do, rapture at a twilight, dream at a dawn or shiver in a storm; nor do they like to walk with Dante, laugh with Moliére, tremble with Shakespeare, crackle with Wag.

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ner; nor to be mute before the David, the Supper or the Parthenon. It is of few that restlessness of avidly pursuing some chimera, venerating philosophers, artists and thinkers who fused in supreme synthesis their visions of being and eternity, flying beyond the real. The beings of your lineage, whose imagination is populated with ideals and whose feeling polarizes towards them the whole personality, form a race apart in humanity: they are idealists.

Defining his own emotion, a poet could say: the Ideal is a gesture of the spirit towards some perfection.

OF AN IDEALISM BASED ON

EXPERIENCE

The philosophers of the future, in order to approach less and less inaccurate forms of expression, will leave to the poets the beautiful privilege of figurative language; and the future systems, shedding old mystical and dialectical residues, will gradually place Experience as the foundation of all legitimate hypotheses.

It is not risky to think that in the ethics to come a moral idealism will flourish, independent of religious dogmas and metaphysical apriorisms: the ideals of perfection, founded on social experience and evolutionary like itself, will constitute the intimate interweaving of a doctrine of indefinite perfectibility, propitious to all the possibilities of human exaltation.

An ideal is not a dead formula, but a perfectible hypothesis; in order to be useful, it must be conceived as such, acting in function of the social life that incessantly evolves. The imagination, starting from experience, anticipates judgments about future perfections: ideals, among all beliefs, represent the highest result of the thinking function.

Human evolution is a continuous effort of man to adapt to nature, which evolves in its turn. For this he needs to know the reality of his environment and to foresee the meaning of his own adaptations: the paths of his perfection. Its stages are reflected in the mind.

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human beings as ideals. A man, a group or a race are idealistic because propitious circumstances determine their imagination to conceive possible perfections.

Ideals are natural formations. They appear when the propitious circumstances that determine their imagination can anticipate experience. They are not entities mysteriously infused in men, nor are they born of chance. They are formed like all phenomena accessible to our observation. They are effects of causes, accidents in the universal evolution investigated by the sciences and summarized by philosophies. And it is easy to explain it, if it is understood. Our solar system is a point in the cosmos; in that point the planet we inhabit is a simple detail; in that detail life is a transitory chemical equilibrium of the surface; among the complications of that living equilibrium the human species dates from a very brief period; in man the function of thinking develops as a perfection of adaptation to the environment; one of its modes is the imagination which allows us to generalize the data of experience, anticipating its possible results and abstracting from it ideas of perfection.

Thus the philosophy of the future, instead of denying them, will allow us to affirm their reality as legitimate aspects of the function of thinking and will re-integrate them into the natural conception of the universe. An ideal is a point and a moment among the infinite possibles that populate space and time.

To evolve is to vary. In human evolution thought varies incessantly. All variation is acquired by predisposed temperaments; useful variations tend to be conserved. Experience determines the natural formation of generic concepts, more and more synthetic; the imagination abstracts from these certain common characters, elaborating general ideas that can be hypotheses about the incessant becoming: thus ideals are formed which, for man, are normative of conduct in consonance with his hypotheses. They are not aprioristic, but induced from a vast experience; on it the imagination is steeped to foresee the sense in which human beings vary.

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nity. Every ideal represents a new state of equilibrium between the past and the future.

Ideals may not be truths; they are beliefs. Their strength lies in their effective elements: they influence our conduct to the extent that we believe them. That is why the abstract representation of future variations acquires a moral value: those most beneficial to the species are conceived as perfections. The future is identified with the perfect. And ideals, being anticipated visions of what is to come, influence conduct and are the natural instrument of all human progress.

While instruction is limited to extending the notions that current experience considers most accurate, education consists in suggesting the ideals that are presumed to be conducive to perfection.

The concept of the best is a natural result of evolution itself. Life naturally tends to perfect itself. Aristotle taught that activity is a movement of being toward its own "entelechy": its state of perfection. Everything that exists pursues its entelechy, and this tendency is reflected in all the other functions of the spirit; the formation of ideals is subject to a determinism, which, because it is complex, is no less absolute. They are not the work of a freedom that escapes the laws of everything universal, nor are they the products of a pure reason that no one knows. They are approximate beliefs about the coming perfection. The future is the best of the present, since it only comes about through natural selection: ideals are a "élan" towards the best, as simple anticipations of becoming.

As human experience expands, observing reality, ideals are modified by the imagination, which is plastic and never rests. Experience and imagination follow parallel paths, although the former lags far behind the latter. The hypothesis flies, the fact walks; sometimes the wing flies wrongly, the foot always steps firmly; but the flight can be rectified, while the step can never fly.

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Imagination is the mother of all originality; deforming the real towards its perfection, it creates ideals and gives them impulse with the illusory feeling of freedom: free will is a useful error for the gestation of ideals. That is why it has, practically speaking, the value of a reality. To demonstrate that it is a simple illusion, due to the ignorance innumerable causes, does not imply denying its efficacy. Illusions have as much value in directing conduct as the most exact truths; they may have more than these, if they are intensely thought or felt. The desire to be free arises from the contrast between two irreducible motives: the tendency to persevere in being, implied in heredity, and the tendency to increase being, implied in variation. The one is a principle of stability, the other of progress.

In every ideal, whatever the order to whose perfection it tends, there is a principle of synthesis and continuity: "it is either a fixed idea or a fixed emotion". As propellants of human activity, they are equal and reciprocally implied, although in the former reasoning predominates and in the latter passion. "That principle of unity, center of attraction and fulcrum of all work of the creative imagination, that is, of a subjective synthesis that tends to objectify itself, is the ideal" said Ribot. Imagination strips reality of all that is bad and adorns it with all that is good, purifying experience, crystallizing it in the molds of perfection that it conceives to be purest. Ideas are, therefore, imaginative reconstructions of the reality that becomes.

They are always individual. A collective ideal is the coincidence of many individuals in the same desire for perfection. It is not that an "idea" unites them, but that analogous ways of feeling and thinking converge towards an "ideal" common to all of them. Each era, century or generation can have its own ideal; it is usually the patrimony of a select minority, whose efforts succeed in imposing it on the following generations. Each ideal can be incarnated in a genius; at the beginning, while he defines it or shapes it, it is only understood by the small nucleus of spirits sensitive to the rhythm of the new belief.

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The abstract concept of a possible perfection draws its strength from the Truth that men attribute to it: every ideal is a faith in the very possibility of perfection. In its involuntary protest against evil there is always revealed an indestructible hope for the better; in its aggression against the past it ferments a wholesome leaven of the future.

It is not an end, but a way. It is always relative, like all belief. The intensity with which it tends to be realized does not depend on its actual truth but on that which is attributed to it. Even when it erroneously interprets the perfection to come, it is ideal for those who sincerely believe in its truth or its excellence.

To reduce idealism to the dogma of a metaphysical school is tantamount to emasculating it; to call idealism the fantasies of sick or ignorant minds, which believe that they are thus sublimating their incapacity to live and to enlighten themselves, is one of the many lightnesses encouraged by the verbose spirits. The most vulgar philosophical dictionaries suspect this deliberated muddle: "Idealism: a very vague word which should not be used without explanation".

There are as many idealisms as there are ideals; and as many ideals as there are ideas, and as many idealists as there are men capable of conceiving perfections and capable of living toward them. The monopoly of ideals and all those who claim it in the name of philosophical schools, moral systems, religious creeds, sect fanaticism or aesthetic dogma must be rejected.

Idealism" is not the privilege of spiritualistic doctrines, which would like to oppose it to "materialism," thus derogatorily calling all the others; this misunderstanding, so much exploited by the enemies of the Sciences - rightly considered as fountains of Truth and Freedom - is doubled by suggesting that matter is the antithesis of the idea, after confusing the ideal with the idea, and the latter with the spirit, as a transcendent entity and alien to the real world. This is, visibly, a play on words, secularly repeated by its beneficiaries, who transport to philosophical doctrines the sense that the words idealism and materialism have in the moral order. The longing for perfection in the knowledge of Truth can animate the philosopher with equal impetus.

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The particular ideal of each one contributes to the total rate of perfection possible, rather than hindering the similar effort of the others. The particular ideal of each one contributes to the total pace of possible perfection, rather than hindering the similar effort of the others.

And the tendency to confuse idealism, which refers to ideals, with the metaphysical tendencies that are so denoted because they consider "ideas" more real than reality itself, or presuppose that they are the only reality, forged by our mind, as in the Hegelian system, is even more narrow. "Ideologues" cannot be synonymous with "idealists," even if misuse leads one to believe it.

We could not restrict it to the pretended idealism of certain aesthetic schools, because all the ways of naturalism and realism can constitute an ideal of art, when their priests are Michelangelo, Titian, Flaubert or Wagner; the imaginative effort of those who pursue an ideal harmony of rhythms, colors, lines or sounds, is equivalent, as long as their work is transparent a way of beauty or an original personality.

Finally, we must not confuse it with a certain ethical idealism that tends to monopolize the cult of perfection in favor of one of the predominant religious fanaticism of the time, for if there no single and inevitable ideal good, it would hardly fit into the catechisms for obtuse minds. Ideal good would hardly fit into catechisms for obtuse minds. The individual effort towards virtue can be as magnificently conceived and realized by the Peripatetic as the Cyrenaic, by the Christian as by the anarchist, by the philanthropist as by the Epicurean, for all philosophical theories are equally incompatible with the individual aspiration towards human perfection. All of them can be idealists, if they know how to enlighten themselves in their doctrine; and in all doctrines they can shelter themselves worthy and seeking, virtuous and shameless. The yearning and the possibility of perfection is not the heritage of any creed: it recalls the water of that fountain, quoted by Plato, which could not be contained in any vessel.

Experience, and experience alone, decides on the legitimacy of ideas in each time and place. In the course of social life they are naturally selected; the most adapted survive, those that best foresee the direction of evolution; that is to say, those that coincide with the perfection of the idea.

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effective. As long as experience does not give its verdict, every ideal is respectable, even if it seems absurd. And it is useful because of its counter force; if it is false, it dies alone, it does no harm. Every ideal, being a belief, can contain a part of error, or be totally so; it is a remote vision and, therefore, exposed to be inaccurate. The only bad thing is to lack ideals and to enslave oneself to the contingencies of immediate practical life, renouncing the possibility of moral perfection.

When a philosopher enunciates ideals, for man or for society, their immediate comprehension is all the more difficult when they rise above the conventional prejudices and verbiage of the surrounding environment; the same is true of the truth of the sage and the style of the poet. The sanction of others is easy for that which is consistent with age-old routines; it is difficult when the imagination does not place greater originality in concept or form.

This imbalance between conceivable perfection and practicable reality lies in the very nature of the imagination, rebellious to time and space. From this legitimate contrast it does not follow that the logical, aesthetic or moral ideals must be contradictory to each other, even if they are heterogeneous and set the pace unequally, according to the times: there is no amoral or ugly Truth, nor was Beauty ever absurd or harmful, nor was the Good rooted in error or disharmony. Otherwise we would conceive imperfect perfections.

The paths of perfection are convergent. The infinite forms of the ideal are complementary: never contradictory, although it may seem so. If the ideal of science is Truth, of morality Good and of art Beauty, preeminent forms of all excellence, it is not conceivable that they can be antagonistic.

Ideals are in perpetual becoming, like the forms of the reality they anticipate. The imagination constructs them by observing nature, as a result of experience; but once formed they are no longer in it, they are anticipations of it, they live on it to point to its future. And when reality evolves towards a previously foreseen ideal, the imagination once again departs from reality, it moves away from

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it to the ideal, proportionally. Reality can never equal reverie in this perpetual pursuit of the chimera. The ideal is a "limit": every reality is a "variable dimension" that can approach it indefinitely, without ever reaching it. However much the "variable" approaches its "limit," it is conceived that it could approach it more; they are only confused in infinity.

Every ideal is always relative to an imperfect present reality. There are no absolutes. To affirm this would imply abjuring their very essence, denying the infinite possibility of perfection. The old moralists were mistaken in believing that at the point where their spirit was at that moment, all space and all time converged; for modern ethics, free from this serious fallacy, the relativity of ideals is a fundamental postulate. They possess only one common character: their permanent transformation towards unlimited perfections.

Any morality based on superstition and dogmatism is typical of primitive people. And it is contrary to all idealism, excluding all ideals. At every moment and in every place reality varies; with that variation the point of reference of ideals shifts. They are born and die, converge or are excluded, pale or are accentuated; they, too, are living like the brains in which they germinate or take root, in an endless process. There being no final and unsurpassable scheme of perfection, neither is there one of human ideals. They are formed by constant change; they are always evolving; their palingenesis is eternal.

This evolution of ideals does not follow a uniform rhythm in the course of social or individual life. There are moral climates, hours, moments, in which a whole race, a people, a class, a party, a sect conceives an ideal and strives to realize it. And there are those in the evolution of each man, considered in isolation.

There are also climates, times and moments in which ideals are barely murmured or are silenced: reality offers immediate satisfactions to appetites and the temptation of weariness drowns out any desire for perfection.

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Each epoch has certain ideals that foresee the future better, glimpsed by few, followed by the people or drowned by their indifference, sometimes predestined to guide it like magnetic poles, sometimes to remain latent until they find glory at the right time and in the right climate. And other ideals die, because they are false beliefs: illusions that man forges about himself or verbal chimeras that the ignorant pursue in the shadows.

Without ideals, human evolution would be inexplicable. There were and always will be. They palpitate behind every magnificent effort made by a man or a people. They are successive beacons in the mental evolution of individuals and races. Imagination kindles them, continually surpassing experience, anticipating its results. That is the law of human becoming: events, barren of themselves for the human mind, receive life and warmth from ideals, without whose influence they would lie inert and the centuries would be mute. The facts are points of departure; the ideals are luminous beacons that from stretch to stretch illuminate the route. The history of civilization shows an infinite restlessness of perfections, which great men foresee, announce or symbolize. In the face of these heralds, at every moment of the human pilgrimage there is a force that obstructs all paths: mediocrity, which is an incapacity for ideals.

Thus conceived, idealism should be reintegrated into any future scientific philosophy. It may seem strange to those who use words without defining their meaning and to those who are afraid of getting involved in the logomachies of the verbalists.

Clearly defined, separated from its secular weeds, it will always be the privilege of all men who honor, by their virtues, the human species. As a doctrine of perfectibility, superior to any dogmatic affirmation, idealism will certainly win. Misrepresented by the short-sighted and the fanatical, it is lowered. Those who look to the past, setting their course towards dead prejudices and dressing up idealism as a doctrine of perfectibility, superior to any dogmatic affirmation, will certainly win.

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Ideals live by Truth, which is being made; nor can any be vital that contradicts it in its point of time. It is blindness to oppose the imagination of the future to the experience of the present, the Ideal to Truth, as if it were expedient to extinguish the lights of the way so as not to deviate from the goal. It is false; imagination and experience go hand in hand. Alone, they do not go.

To the dogmatic idealism that the ancient metaphysicians placed in absolute and aprioristic "ideas", we oppose an experiential idealism that refers to the "ideals" of perfection, incessantly renewed, plastic, evolving like life itself.

III IDEALISTIC TEMPERAMENTS

No Dante could elevate Gil Bles. Sancho and Tartuffe to the corner of their paradise where Cyrano, Quixote and Stockmann dwell. They are two moral worlds, two races, two temperaments: Shadows and Men. Unequal beings cannot think alike. There will always be evident contrast between servility and dignity, clumsiness and genius, hypocrisy and virtue. Imagination will give to some the original impulse toward the perfect; imitation will organize in others the collective habits. There will always be, perforce, idealists and mediocrities.

Human improvement takes place at different rates in societies and individuals. Most of them have a submissive experience to the past: routines, prejudices, domesticities. Few chosen ones vary, advancing on the future; contrary to Antaeus, who, touching the ground, took new breaths, they take them by sticking their pupils in distant and seemingly inaccessible cons- telations. These men, predisposed to emancipate themselves from their flock, seeking some perfection beyond the present, are the "idealists". The unity of the genus does not depend on the intrinsic content of its ideals but on its temperament: one is an idealist pursuing the most contradictory chimeras, as long as they imply a sincere desire for exaltation. Any. The spirits feverish for some ideal are adversaries of mediocrity:

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dreamers against the utilitarian, enthusiastic against the apathetic, generous against the calculating, undisciplined against the dogmatic. They are somebody or something against those who are nobody or nothing. Every idealist is a qualitative man: he possesses a sense of differences which enables him to distinguish between the bad that he observes, and the better that he imagines. Men without ideals are quantitative; they can appreciate the more and the less, but they never distinguish the better from the worse.

Without ideals, progress would be inconceivable. The cult of the "practical man," limited to the contingencies of the present, implies a renunciation of all imperfection. Habit organizes routine and creates nothing for the future; it is only from the imaginative that science expects its hypotheses, art its flight, morality its examples, history its luminous pages. They are the living and dynamic part of humanity; the practical ones have done no more than take advantage of their efforts, vegetating in the shadows. Every future has been a creation of men capable of foreseeing it, concretizing it in an infinite succession of ideals. Imagination has done more to build without respite than calculation has done to destroy without respite. The excessive prudence of the mediocre has always paralyzed the most fruitful initiatives. And this does not mean that imagination excludes experience: the latter is useful, but without the former it is sterile. Idealists aspire to combine inspiration and wisdom in their minds; that is why, frequently, they are hindered by their critical spirit when a lyrical emotion warms them and blurs their vision when they observe reality. From the balance between inspiration and wisdom, genius is born. In the great hours of a race or a man, inspiration is indispensable to create; that spark is ignited in the imagination and experience turns it into a bonfire. All idealism is, therefore, a desire for intense culture: it counts ignorance, the stepmother of obstinate routines, among its most daring enemies.

Humanity does not go as far as the idealists want it to go in every particular perfection; but it always goes further than it would have gone without their effort. A goal that flees before them becomes a stimulus to pursue new chimeras. The little that they can all, from

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depends on how much some people yearn for. Humanity would not possess its present goods if some idealists had not conquered them by living with the obsessive aspiration for better ones.

In human evolution, ideals are kept in unstable equilibrium. Every real improvement is preceded by attempts and attempts of audacious thinkers, put in tension towards it, rebellious to the past, although without the necessary intensity to do violence to it; this struggle is a perpetual ebb and flow between the most conceived and the least realized. That is why idealists are necessarily restless, like everything that lives, like life itself; against the peaceful tendency of the routine ones, whose stability seems like the inertia of death. This restlessness is exacerbated in great men, in the geniuses themselves if the environment is hostile to their chimeras, as is often the case. It does not agitate men without ideals, in- forme mortar of humanity.

All youth is restless. The impulse towards the best can only be expected from them: never from the moldy and senile. And only healthy and enlightened youth is youth, that which looks ahead and not behind; never the decrepit of a few years, prematurely domesticated by the superstitions of the past: what seems like spring in them is autumnal tieza, illusion of dawn that is already a twilight extinguishing. There is youth only in those who work with enthusiasm for the future; that is why in excellent characters it can persist over the waning of the years.

Nothing can be expected of men who enter life without being attached to some ideal; to those who have never been young, all dreams seem to be lost. And one is not born young: youth must be acquired. And without an ideal it is not acquired.

Idealists tend to be elusive or rebellious to the social dogmatism that oppresses them. They resist the tyranny of the leveling gear, abhor all coercion, feel the weight of the honors that try to domesticate them and make them accomplices of the vested interests, docile - malleable, supportive, uniform in the common mediocrity. The conservative forces that make up the social underground pretend to

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amalgamate individuals, decapitating them; they detest differences, they abhor exceptions, they anathematize those who stray in search of their own personality. The original, the imaginative, the creator does not fear their hatreds: he defies them, even though he knows them to be terrible because they are irresponsible. That is why every idealist is a living affirmation of individualism, even if he pursues a social chimera; he can live for others, never from others. His independence is a hostile reaction to all dogmatists. Conceiving themselves to be incessantly perfectible, the idealistic temperaments want to say at every moment of their lives, like Don Quixote: "I know who I am". They live animated by this affirmative eagerness. In their ideals, they encode both their supreme fortune and their perpetual unhappiness. In them they heat the passion that animates their faith; this, when it crashes against social reality, may seem contempt, isolation, my- santropy: the classic "ivory tower" reproached to those who bristle at the contact of the obtuse. It could be said that Teresa of Avila left an eternal image of them: "We are silkworms, little worms that we spin the silk of our lives and in the silk cocoon we are encircled so that the worm dies and the butterfly flies out of the cocoon".

All idealism is exaggerated, it needs to be. And its language must be warm, as if it overflowed the personality over the impersonal; thought without warmth is dead, cold, lacks style, has no signature. Never were geniuses, saints and heroes lukewarm. To create a particle of Truth, of Virtue or of Beauty, requires an original and violent effort against some routine or prejudice; as to give a lesson of dignity, some servility must be broken. Every ideal is, instinctively, extreme; it must be so knowingly, if necessary, for it is soon lowered by refracting itself in the mediocrity of others. In contrast to the hypocrites who lie with vile objectives, the exaggeration of the idealists is hardly a passionate truth. Passion is its necessary attribute, even when it seems to deviate from the truth; it leads to hyperbole, to error itself; never to lies. No ideal is false for him who professes it: he believes it to be true and cooperates in its advent,

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with faith, with disinterestedness. The wise man seeks Truth for the sake of seeking it, and enjoys wresting from nature secrets that are useless or dangerous to him. And the artist also seeks his own, because Beauty is a truth animated by imagination rather than by experience. And the moralist pursues it in the Good, which is a right loyalty of conduct towards himself and towards others. To have an ideal is to serve one's own Truth. Always.

Some ideals reveal themselves as combative passion and others as obstinate obsession; in the same way, two types of idealists can be distinguished, according to whether the heart or the brain predominates in them. Sentimental idealism is romantic: imagination is not inhibited by criticism and ideals live by feeling. In experimental idealism the affective rhythms are guided by experience and criticism coordinates the imagination: ideals become reflective and serene. One corresponds to youth and the other to maturity. The first is adolescent, grows, pushes and fights; the second is adult, fixes, resists, conquers.

The perfect idealist would be romantic at twenty and stoic at fifty; stoicism in youth is as abnormal as romanticism in middle age. What at first inflames his passion must later crystallize into supreme dignity: that is the logic of his temperament.

ROMANTIC

IDEALISM

Romantic idealists are exaggerated because they are insatiable. They dream the most in order to realize the least; they understand that all ideas contain a particle of utopia and lose something in their realization: of races or of individuals, they never integrate as they are thought. In few things can man reach the Ideal that the imagination points out: his glory is in marching towards it, always unreached and unattainable. After illuminating his spirit with all the splendors of human culture, Goethe dies asking for more light; and Musset wants to love ince-

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santemente after having loved, offering his life for a caress and his genius for a kiss. Romantics seem to ask themselves, with the poet: "Why is not human power infinite, like desire?" They have a curiosity of a thousand eyes, always attentive not to miss the most imperceptible titillation of the world that solicits it. Their sensibility is acute, plural, capricious, artist, as if the nerves had cen- tuplated their impressionability. Their gesture quickly follows the path of the native inclinations: among ten parties they adopt the one underlined by the most intense beating of their heart. They are Dionysian. Their aspirations are translated by active efforts on the social environment or by a hostility against everything that opposes their hunches and dreams. They build their ideals without conceding anything to reality, refusing the control of experience, attacking it if it contradicts them. They are naive and sensitive, easily moved, accessible to enthusiasm and tenderness; with that naivety without duplicity that practical men ignore. One minute is enough for them to decide of a whole life. Their idea crystallizes in unequivocal firmness when the reality hurts them with more viciousness.

Every romantic is for Don Quixote against Sancho, for Cyrano against Tartuffe, for Stockmann against Gil Blas; for any ideal against all mediocrity. He prefers the flower to the fruit, sensing that the latter could never exist without the former. The accommodating temperaments know that life guided by interest brings material benefits; the romantics believe that the supreme dignity is incubated in reverie and passion. For them a kiss from such a woman is worth more than a hundred treasures from Golconda.

Their eloquence is in their heart: they have those "reasons that reason ignores", as Pascal said. In them lies the irresistible charm of the Mussets and the Byrons: their passionate stuosity shakes us, chokes us as if a claw were squeezing our neck, startles our veins, smokes our eyelids, and shivers our breath. Her heroines and protagonists populate youthful insomnia, as if they were described with a magic wand inked in the chalice of a Greek poetess: Sappho, for example, the most lyrical. Her style is one of light and color, always on fire, ardent

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sometimes. They write as passionate temperaments speak, with that eloquence of voices hoarse with desire or exce- sion, that "voce calda" that drives fine women crazy and makes a Don Juan out of every romantic lover. They are the aristocrats of love; all Juliets and Isoldas dream of them. In vain do worldly hypocrisies conspire against them; the sapphic spirits would like to invent a scale to weigh the immediate usefulness of their inclinations. As they do not possess it, they renounce to follow them.

Man, incapable of encouraging noble passions, shuns love as if it were an abyss; he ignores that it is the most effective of all virtues and the most effective of moralists. He lives and dies without having learned to love. He caricatures this feeling guided by the suggestions of sordid conveniences. The others choose him first the beloved ones and then impose him the wife. He cares little for the fidelity of the first, as long as they serve him as ornaments; he never demands intelligence in the other, if she is a step in his world. Musset seems to him not very serious and he finds Byron infernal; he would have burned George Sand and Teresa of Avila herself seems to him a little exaggerated. He persecutes himself if anyone suspects that Christ could have loved the sinner of Magdala. He firmly believes that Werther, Joselyn, Mimi, Rolla and Manon are symbols of evil, created by the imagination of sick artists. He abhors deep and heartfelt passion, detests sentimental manticisms. It prefers the quiet purchase to the compromising conquest. It ignores the supreme virtues of love, which is reverie, longing, danger, all the imagination converting to the embellishment of the instinct, and not simple brutal vertigo of the senses.

In eras of debasement, when mediocrity is at its height, idealists align themselves against social dogmatism, whatever the dominant regime may be. Sometimes, in the name of political romaticism, they stir up a democratic and humane ideal. Their love for all those who suffer is a righteous fury against those who oppress their own individuality. It might be said that they go so far as to love the victims in order to protest against the unworthy executioner; but they always remain outside any

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The host, knowing that in it may incubate a future opportunity for the future.

In everything that is perfectible there is room for romanticism; its orientation varies with the times and with inclinations. There are times when it most flourishes, as in the hours of reaction that followed the libertarian upheaval of the French Revolution. Some romantics believe themselves to be providential and their imagination is revealed by a constructive mysticism, as in Fourier and Lamennais, preceded by Rousseau, who was a Calvinist Marx, and followed by Marx, who was a Jewish Rousseau. In others, lyricism tends, as in Byron and Ruskin, to become static religion. In Mazzini and Kossouth it takes on a political color. It speaks in a prophetic and transcendent tone through the mouths of Lamartine and Hugo. In Stendhal it ironically harasses social dogmatism and in Vigny it bitterly scorns it. It grieves in Musset and despairs in Amiel. Fus- tiga to mediocrity with Flaubert and Barbey d'Aurevilly. And in others it turns into open rebellion against all that threatens and domesticates the individual, as in Emerson, Stirner, Guyau, lbsen or Nietzsche.

STOIC

IDEALISM

Romantic rebellions are dulled by experience: it confronts many fallacious impetuosities and gives ideals more solid firmness. The lessons of reality do not kill the idealist: they educate him. His eagerness for perfection becomes more centripetal and dignified, he seeks the propitious paths, learns to save the lurks that mediocrity tends to him. When the force of things overcomes his personal stillness and social dogmatism inhibits his efforts to straighten them out, his idealism becomes experimental. He cannot bend reality to his ideals, but he defends them from it, trying to save them from any diminution or debasement. What was previously projected outward, polarized in one's own effort, becomes interiorized. A great life," wrote Vigny, "is an ideal of youth realized in maturity. It is inherent in the first illusion to impose one's reveries, break-

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The mediocre man

When experience warns that the mass does not fall, the idealist, entrenching himself in intrinsic virtues, guarding his ideals, realizing them to some extent, without solidarity ever leading him to clumsy complicity. Sentimental and romantic idealism is transformed into experimental and stoic idealism; experience regulates the imagination, making it thoughtful and reflective. The serene classical harmony replaces the impetuous drive: Dionysian Idealism becomes Apollonian Idealism.

It is only natural that this should be so. Romanticisms do not resist critical experience: if they last past the limits of youth, their ardor is not equal to their efficiency. Cervantes' mistake was the advanced age at which Don Quixote undertakes the pursuit of his chimera. It is more logical Don Juan, marrying at the same height at which Christ dies; the characters that Mürger created in the bohemian life, stop in that limbo of maturity. It cannot be . The accumulation of contrasts ends up coordinating the imagination, guiding it without lowering it.

And if the idealist is a superior mind, his ideal assumes definitive forms: it shapes Truth, Beauty or Virtue in more permanent crucibles, it tends to become fixed and to last in works. Time consecrates him and his effort becomes exemplary. Posterity judges him to be a classic. All classicism comes from a natural selection among ideals that were romantic in their time and have survived through the centuries.

Few dreamers find such a climate and such an occasion to en- cumbrate them to genius. Most of them are exotic and inopportune; events whose determinism they cannot modify sterilize their efforts. Hence a certain acquiescence to things that do not depend on their own merit, a tolerance of all indes- variable fatality. When they feel external coercion, they do not lower themselves or defile themselves: they withdraw, they take refuge in themselves to stand on the shore from where they gaze upon the muddy stream that runs murmuring, without a cry being heard in its murmur. They are the judges of their time: they see where it comes from and how the turbulence flows.

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José Ingenieros

silted up. They uncover the omissive who allow themselves to be overshadowed by the slime, those who pursue those fallacious encumbrances that are at odds with merit and justice.

The stoic idealist remains hostile to his milieu, as does the romantic. His attitude is one of open resistance to organized mediocrity, disdainful resignation or haughty renunciation, without compromise. It matters little to him to attack the evil that others consent to; it serves him better to be free to achieve any perfection that depends only on his own effort. He acquires an "individualistic sensibility" that is neither vulgar egoism nor disinterest in the ideals that agitate the society in which he lives. The differences between doctrinaire individualism and individualistic sentiment are notorious; the one is theory and the other is attitude. In Spencer, individualistic doctrine is accompanied by social sensibility; in Bakunin, social doctrine coexists with individualistic sensibility. It is a question of temperament and not of ideas; the former is the basis of character. All individualism, as an attitude, is a revolt against the dogmas and false values respected in the mediocracies; it reveals energies yearning to spread out, contained by a thousand obstacles opposed by the gregarious spirit. The individualistic temperament goes so far as to deny the principle of authority, subjugates itself to prejudices, disregards any imposition, scorns hierarchies independent of ritual. Parties, sects and factions are equally indifferent to him, as long as he does not find in them ideals consonant with his own. He believes more in the firm virtues of men than in the written lie of theoretical principles; as long as the best paper laws are not reflected in the customs, they do not modify the foolishness of those who admire them nor the suffering of those who put up with them.

The ethics of the Stoic idealist differs radically from those sordid individualisms which enlist the sympathies of egoists. Two essentially different morals can be born of self-esteem. The worthy chooses the higher, that of Zeno or Epicurus; the me- diocre always chooses the lower and finds himself with Aristippus. The former takes refuge in himself in order to be self-absorbed; the latter absents himself from others in order to

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The mediocre man

dive into the shadows. Individualism is noble if an ideal encourages and elevates it; without an ideal, it is a fall to a lower level than mediocrity itself.

In Greek Cyrenaica, four centuries before the Christian era, Aris- type announced that the only rule of life was maximum pleasure, sought by all means, as if nature dictated to man the weariness of the senses and the absence of ideal. Sensuality, erected as a system, led to tumultuous pleasure, without selecting it. The Cyrenaics came to despise life itself; their last preachers committed suicide. Such ethics, instinctively practiced by the sceptics and depraved of all times, was not loyally erected into a system thereafter. Pleasure-as mere quantitative sensuality-is absurd and unpredictable; it cannot sustain a morality. It would be to set up the senses as judges. Would happiness be in the pursuit of a well-considered interest? A prudent and qualitative egoism, which chooses and calculates, would replace blind appetites. Instead of the coarse pleasure we would have the refined delight, which foresees, coordinates, prepares, enjoys before and infinitely more, because the intelligence likes to centuplicate the future pleasures with wise alchemies of preparation. The Epicureans already move away from Cyrenaism. Aristippus sheltered happiness in the crude material pleasures; Epicurus raises it to the mind, idealizes it by the imagination. For the former, all pleasures are worthwhile and are sought in any way, unleashed without restraint; for the latter, they must be chosen and dignified by a seal of harmony. The original morality of Epicurus is all refinement: its creator lived an honorable and pure life. His law was to seek happiness and to flee from pain, preferring things that leave a balance in favor of the former. This arithmetic of the emotions is not incompatible with dignity, wit and virtue, which are ideal perfections; it allows them to be cultivated, if a source of pleasure can be found in them.

It is in another Hellenic morality, however, that experimental idealism finds its perfect mol- ders. Zeno gave mankind a supreme doctrine of heroic virtue. Dignity is identified with the ideal; history knows no more beautiful examples of conduct. Seneca,

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