As a result of well-known developments in social and political life, there is, in Europe at least, more discussion to-day than there used to be of “intellectuality,” so-called, of its “rights,” and of the importance of “safeguarding” those “rights.” Even “unions” or “leagues of intellectuals” have been proposed.

But all such cautions and precautions, all such vigilance and protection, seem to me to play into the hands of the opposition; for they tend to represent “intellectuality” as a sort of superfluity, a sort of luxury, calculated to make life more pleasant and to lose which would be as melancholy as the loss of our pretty women from the face of the earth, with all their arts and charms—their evening gowns especially. No wonder that, in opposition to such an attitude, there arise a contempt for “intellectuals” and their “literature” and—leagues for leagues, unions for unions—leagues of people who are determined to better their station in life and to have their voice in the direction of affairs; and who can point to needs more fundamental and more urgent than “literature.” To put the discussion on a broader and more satisfactory footing, it is interesting to note that the gentlemen of the opposition (extreme democrats and leaders of the proletariat) nevertheless make, in their attack on “intellectuality,” an exception in favour of one form of intellectual activity: the positive sciences. They even demand the development and wider diffusion of knowledge in the fields of physics, of chemistry, of mechanics, of physiology, and in general of all the branches of learning “useful for living.” And another exception they make in favour of certain artistic products seemingly essential to public hygiene and to the entertainment and instruction of large numbers of people: the theatre, the “movies,” and dancing. Whereupon another interesting fact should be observed: that in this latter exception or demand, democrats and socialists are sharing and propounding an idea belonging to the bourgeoisie, to the “fattest and crassest” bourgeoisie (to use a traditional Latin phrase); for our shop-keeping classes, looking down disdainfully upon philosophers and “literary fellows,” also demand, on the one hand, objects “useful for living,” and on the other spectacles pleasing to not very deep-gazing eyes; and they applaud and remunerate, on the one hand, inventors of machines and patent medicines, and on the other vaudeville actors and ballet girls.

From all this, it becomes apparent that the aversion to “intellectuality” has nothing particularly political or sociological about it, and does not spring from any emotions peculiar to the class struggle. It is nothing but the ancient, the recent, the perpetual conflict between the (cheap and unilateral) practical and the theoretical, between the (insistent and insurgent) body and the mind. It is, indeed, the time-honoured conflict between the parts and the whole. The ancient apologue of the Greeks and the Romans, which takes its name from Menenius Agrippa, is much more aptly applied to this conflict than to the competitions between plebs and patriciate which centuries ago gave rise to the fable of “the body and its members.” What, after all, is this thing which is popularly called the “pursuit of truth and beauty,” or thought and imagination, or simply “brain work”; and is known to the schools as “philosophy” and “art”? It is the Spirit forever aspiring to the Eternal, forever grasping at the universe to penetrate and understand it. That materialistic, commonplace, prosaic men mistake this aspiration and this effort for idleness, amusement, luxury; that many people avail themselves of the pretext of such labours to obtain material advantages and to further their hunt for wealth or notoriety or worse, does not effect the character of that aspiration or the nature of that effort. Rather than “brain work” another more significant name might be given them: they might be called “religion” or the “religious spirit,” for thought and the creative fancy are the fountain-heads of all human faith.

And need we remind any one that this religion, this religious attitude, this aspiration to the Eternal, this life of thought and imagination, is the origin and the creator of all practical life? That without it the “positive sciences,” the sciences which are most utilitarian in the Baconian sense, would lose all encouragement and sustenance? That these same sciences would languish, dry up, come to an end, becoming still more extrinsic and mechanical than they now are? Even social and political conflicts develop from premises of thought and from ideals evolved and pictured in the imagination. The very revolutionary classes themselves, now so noisily contemptuous of philosophy and literature, existed before they came into the world in the “mind of God,” in the mind, that is, of some philosopher or some poet. We need make no defence of something that need not be defended because it cannot be attacked. At the most, it is possible to insult this philosopher or that poet in their individual persons; but never Poetry and Philosophy. These rise, and develop, and do their work, indomitable and dominant through the ages, from an intrinsic and insuperable need of the human Spirit.

And that is why disputes as to the “part” that intellectuality should “play” in present-day society, or in some future Utopian society, seem to me utterly devoid of sense. And at times I am inclined to suspect that the “intellectuals” who bestir themselves in defence of “intellectuality” may be as materialistic and as materialistically occupied as the people with whom they consent to quarrel.