e
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
pigeon-holes and puts them to various purposes, but the idea rarely
occurs to it to examine its material and renew the content of thoug