Page "Ernest Renan" Paragraph 22

They showed the blasé modern reader that a world no less poetic, no less primitive than that of the Origins of Christianity exists or still existed within living memory on the northwestern coast of France.

They have the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, the naturalness, and the veracity which the 19th century prized so highly.

But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames philosophiques, collected in 1888, give a more adequate image of his fastidious critical, disenchanted, yet optimistic spirit.

They show the attitude towards uncultured Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat.

We learn in them how Caliban ( democracy ), the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, makes after all an adequate ruler ; how Prospero ( the aristocratic principle, or, if we will, the mind ) accepts his dethronement for the sake of greater liberty in the intellectual world, since Caliban proves an effective policeman and leaves his superiors a free hand in the laboratory ; how Ariel ( the religious principle ) acquires a firmer hold on life and no longer gives up the ghost at the faintest hint of change.

Indeed, Ariel flourishes in the service of Prospero under the external government of the many-headed brute.

Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify.

Thus, out of the depths rises unvanquished the essential idealism of Renan.