y and
provisionally; he wishes to ascertain its effect; he is always ready to
stay its operation, amend it, or modify it, according to the good or ill
results of experiment; the state of the human material he has to deal
with is never clear to his mind, even when superior, until after many
and repeated gropings.--Now the Jacobin pursues just the opposite
course. His principle is an axiom of political geometry, which always
carries its own proof along with it; for, like the axioms of common
geometry, it is formed out of the combination of a few simple ideas, and
its evidence imposes itself at once on all minds capable of embracing
in one conception the two terms of which it is the aggregate expression.
Man in general, the rights of Man, the social contract, liberty,
equality, reason, nature, the people, tyrants, are examples of these
basic concepts: whether precise or not, they fill the brain of the new
sectarian. Often these terms are merely vague and grandiose words, but
that makes no difference; as soon as they meet in his brain an axiom
springs out of them that can be instantly and absolutely applied on
every occasion and to excess. Mankind as it is does not concern him. He
does not observe them; he does not require to observe them; with closed
eyes he imposes a pattern of his own on the human substance manipulated
by him; the idea never enters his head of forming any previous
conception of this complex, multiform, swaying material--contemporary
peasants, artisans, townspeople, cures and nobles, behind their plows,
in their homes, in their shops, in their parsonages, in their mansions,
with their inveterate beliefs, persistent inclinations, and powerful
wills. Nothing of this enters into or lodges in his mind; all its
avenues are stopped by the abstract principle which flourishes there
and fills it completely. Should actual experience through the eye or
ear plant some unwelcome truth forcibly in his mind, it cannot subsist
there; however noisy and relentless it may be, the abstract principle
drives it out;[1116] if need be it will distort and strangle it,
considering it a slanderer since it refutes a principle which is true
and undeniable in itself. Obviously, a mind of this kind is not sound;
of the two faculties which should pull together harmoniously, one is
degenerated and the other overgrown; facts cannot turn the scale against
the theory. Charged on one side and empty on the other, the Jacobin mind
turns violent