“Greedy of hierarchy, we humans have divided into high and low occupations the diverse employment of our forces. The parasites who have made themselves our masters, all in proclaiming themselves superior, have established that there is nothing truly noble but idleness, that there is nothing truly beautiful but force exerted to destroy; that force expended to produce, to draw out of the earth and out of industry whatever is necessary to sustain life, is of a vile, inferior quality, and that its use should be reserved to the servile classes.
“On this basis we continue to declare certain occupations low, forgetting that they are such only because one class is forced to pursue them in the service of another class, to submit to its orders and caprices, to abdicate its liberty; but there can be nothing base in no matter what work which consists in ministering to our own needs.
“The artist and the littérateur belong to the masses. They cannot isolate themselves, and inevitably feel the effects of the surrounding mediocrity. It is vain for them to intrench themselves behind the privileges of the ruling classes, to attempt to withdraw into their ‘_tour d’ivoire_’: if there is debasement for him who is reduced to performing the vilest tasks to satisfy his hunger, the morality of those who condemn him to it is not superior to his own; if obedience degrades, command, far from exalting character, degrades it also.
“To live their dream, realise their aspirations, they, too, must work—for the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses. They, too, must understand that their own development is made up of the intellectuality of all; that, whatever the heights they believe they have attained, they belong to the multitude. If they strain to rise above the multitude, a thousand bonds hold them to it, fetter their action and their thought, preventing them forever from reaching the summits they have glimpsed. A society normally constituted does not admit slaves, but a mutual exchange of services between equals.”
“The very savant, who considers dealing with knowledge the noblest employ of the human faculties, must learn that knowledge is not a private domain reserved for a few adepts uttering oracles before a public of ignoramuses, who take them at their word; and that in science, as in art and in literature, the faculties of judgment, of observation, and of comparison, do not differ from the faculties employed in occupations which we consider more vulgar.