Thinking is not believing. Few people understand this. Nearly everyone, even those who seem to have discarded religion completely, look to the sciences for something they can believe. They cling to ideas with a kind of fury; and if anyone attempts to remove them, they are ready to bite. They say they have a ‘passionate curiosity’ and, instead of saying there is a problem they call it a mystery. They speak of lifting the veil of Isis, as if this were something prohibited, and as if miraculous joys are to be found behind it. But in these discussions, you don’t see them smile; they are as strained as Titans lifting a mountain.
I have a completely different idea of intelligence. I see it freer than that, and more cheerful. I see it young; intelligence is what in a human being remains forever young. I see it in movement, light as a butterfly; landing on the frailest things without even making them bend. I see it as a deft and delicate hand that feels an object, not a heavy hand that deforms what it grasps. When a person believes, the stomach is involved and the whole body stiffens; the believer is like ivy on a tree. Thinking is something quite different. One might say: to think is to invent without believing.
Imagine a distinguished physicist who has studied gases for many years, has heated them, chilled them, compressed them, rarefied them. He comes to suppose that gases are made of thousands of very small projectiles launched vigorously in all different directions and bombarding the sides of a container. You can see him defining and calculating; you can see him taking apart his ‘perfect gas’ and putting it back together, like a watchmaker with a watch. Well now, I don’t believe at all that he’s like a hunter eyeing his prey. I see him smiling and playing with his theory; I see him working calmly and receiving objections as friends; quite prepared to change his definitions if they’re not verified by experience, simply, and without melodramatic gestures. If you ask him: do you believe that’s how gases are? He will reply: I don’t believe that’s how they are, I think that’s how they are. This freedom of the mind is almost always badly understood and is taken for scepticism. A freed slave retains the gait of a slave for a long time; the memory of the chain means that he still drags one leg; and although he has sent god to the devil, he still does not know how to think without the flames of hell colouring his cheeks.
15/01/1908 Pleiade I, p.27
English translation copyright © Michel Petheram