Life Of Study & Thought

Joseph Ernest Renan, The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1891), xxi (emphasis mine; written to Monsieur Eugène Burnouf, March 1849):

    Monsieur

During the last twelvemonth my thoughts have frequently gone back to that memorable 25th February 1848, when after having scaled the barricades to get to the Collége de France we found our modest room transformed into a guardroom, to which we were welcomed like so many suspected individuals. That day I asked myself more seriously than ever whether a man could do better than devote every moment of his life to study and to thought, and after having consulted my conscience and strengthened my faith in human intellect, I resolutely answered; ‘‘No.’’ If science were nothing more than an agreeable pastime, a kind of diversion for the idle, a mere costly ornament, a hobby for the amateur, in short the least vain of all vanities, there might be times when the savant would have occasion to say with the poet;

Shame to him who sings, the while Rome burns.

But if science be a serious matter, if the destinies of mankind and the perfection of the individual be bound up with it, if it be a religion, it has like matters of religion its value every day, every moment of our lives. To devote to study and intellectual culture only our moments of peace and leisure is an insult to the human intellect, it is tacitly supposing that there is something more important than the pursuit of truth.