Anibale Carraccio, Ostade, Ruysdael, or even by our own Škreta and Brandl?[1] Where are the brains to be found to-day which marked the long array of ingenious sculptors beginning with Phidias, Skopas, and Praxiteles? Where are the brains which constructed plans of magnificent domes, palaces, pantheons? Where are the brains of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn? Where are the brains of the Garricks, Keans, Talmas, Rachels? And if we live in the age of progress, what shows that progress?”
“Modern pedagogy!” some one ironically remarked at the lawyers’ table.
“Truly,” my friend replied, “modern pedagogy can boast of an unusual success. Study is our motto, and the accumulation of knowledge our aim; and from our earliest childhood on we are being whipped with both moral and real rods in order to force our brains to a greater, unusual activity. And yet that wonderful gray matter of our brain can never be different in substance from what it actually is; and its mysterious processes cannot result in any other way than that conditioned by this supposed organ of thinking, feeling, and recollection.”
“But the law!—” From the pedagogues’ table came this sarcastic exclamation.
“—can boast of a brilliant success,” interrupted my friend; “for if in spite of all efforts it has failed to establish the very meaning of right, in return it has blessed mankind with billions of laws and regulations,—some obscure, some clear, but all of them elastic. Each law may be construed in a thousand and one different ways, and each may be evaded and opposed. How strange! Even modern justice has to be guarded by bayonets and cannon. In the background yawns the prison. Is there any one who can boast of knowing all the innumerable laws? At any step we may tumble down and fall into the trap of some law unknown to us. And if there were no instinct—”
“Good!” applauded the physicians, with malicious joy.
“I have to admit,” my friend continued, “that the physicians, whom we may justly deem the greatest benefactors of mankind, do
- ↑ Karel Škreta and Petr Brandl, two noted Bohemian artists.
