Orators, sophists, and pleaders, the three corporations of the Faculty of Letters—Letters of State, signed and patented!
The studies of the “scientifics” ought to have protected them better from the suggestions and contagions of the outside world—that is, if they confined themselves to their trade. Unfortunately they have been tempted from it, for the applied sciences have taken so large a place in practical affairs that experts find themselves thrown into the foremost ranks of action, and exposed to all the infections of the public mind. Their self-respect is directly interested in the victory of the community, which can as easily assimilate the heroism of the soldier as the follies and falsehoods of the publicist. Few scientific men have had the strength to keep themselves free; for the most part they have only contributed the rigour, the stiffness of the geometrical mind, added to professional rivalries, always more acute between learned bodies of different nationalities.
The regular writers, poets, and novelists, who have no official ties, they, at least should have the advantages of their independence; but unfortunately few of them are able to judge for themselves of events which are beyond the limits of their habitual preoccupations, commercial or aesthetic. The greater number, and not the least known, are as ignorant as fishes. It would be best for them to stick to their shop, according to their natural instinct; but their vanity has been foolishly tickled, and they have been urged to mix themselves up with public affairs, and give their opinion on the universe. They can naturally have but scattering views on such subjects, and in default of personal judgment, they drift with the current, reacting with extreme quickness to any shock, for they are ultra-sensitive, with a morbid vanity which exaggerates the thoughts of others when it cannot express their own. This is the only originality at their disposal, and God knows they make the most of it!
What remains? the Clergy? It is they who handle the heaviest explosives; the ideas of Justice, Truth, Right, and God; and they make this artillery fight for their passions. Their absurd pride, of which they are quite unconscious, causes them to lay claim to the property of God, and to the exclusive right to dispose of it wholesale and retail.
It is not so much that they lack sincerity, virtue, or kindness, but they do lack humility; they have none, however much they may profess it. Their practice consists in adoring their navel as they see it reflected in the Talmud, or the Old and New Testaments. They are monsters of pride, not so very far removed from the fool of legend who thought himself God the Father. Is it so much less dangerous to believe oneself His manager, or His secretary?
Clerambault was struck by the morbid character of the intellectual species. In the bourgeois caste the power of organisation and expression of ideas has reached almost monstrous proportions. The equilibrium of life is destroyed by a bureaucracy of the mind which thinks itself much superior to the simple worker. Certainly no one can deny that it has its uses; it collects and classifies thoughts in its pigeonholes and puts them to various purposes, but the idea rarely occurs to it to examine its material and renew the content of thought.
It remains the vain guardian of a demonetised treasure. If only this mistake were a harmless one; but ideas that are not constantly confronted with reality, which are not frequently dipped into the stream of experience, grow dry, and take on a toxic character. They throw a heavy shadow over the new life, bring on the night and produce fever. What a stupid thraldom to abstract words! Of what use is it to dethrone kings and by what right do we jeer at those who die for their masters, if it is only to put tyrannic entities in their places, which we adorn with their tinsel? It is much better, to have a flesh and blood monarch, whom you can control—suppress if necessary—than these abstractions, these invisible despots, that no one knows now, nor ever has known. We deal only with the head Eunuchs, the priests of the hidden Crocodile, as Taine calls him, the wire-pulling ministers who speak in the idol’s name.—Ah! let us tear away the veil and know the creature hidden inside of us. There is less danger when man shows frankly as a brute than when he drapes himself in a false and sickly idealism. He does not eliminate his animal instincts, he only deifies and tries to explain them, but as this cannot be done without excessive simplification—according to the law of the mind which in order to grasp must let go an equal amount—he disguises and intensifies them in one direction. Everything that departs from the straight line or that interferes with the strict logic of his mental edifice, he denies; worse he pulls it up by the roots, and commands that it be destroyed in the name of sacred principles. It therefore follows that he cuts down much of the infinite growth of nature, and allows to stand only the trees of the mind that he chooses—generally those that flourish in deserts and ruins and which there grow abnormally. Of such is the crushing predominance of one single tyrannous form of the Family, of Country, and of the narrow morality which serves them. The poor creature is proud of it all; and it is he who is the victim.
Humanity does not dare to massacre itself from interested motives. It is not proud of its interests, but it does pride itself on its ideas which are a thousand times more deadly. Man sees his own superiority in his ideas, and will fight for them; but herein I perceive his folly, for this warlike idealism is a disease peculiar to him, and its effects are similar to those of
