Americans and Americanised Frenchmen collaborate to their own mutual satisfaction: you will there find what the Simon-pure article is in theory and practice. For instance a certain M. Louis Aragon,--described by his admiring introducer as “an intellectual on a lifelong holiday, a twentieth-century pilgrim with a pack of words on his back,” etc.,--expounds the theory thus: Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I have already driven you from my dreams. And now I am at the point where they are ready to blend with the realities of appearance. There is no longer room only for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of sensuality. In vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is here the queen. Come in, Madame, this is my body, this is your throne. I pat my delirium as I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation. And so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of reality are artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style: _Ité ité la réa Ité ité la réalité La réa la réa Té té La réa Li Té La réalité Il y avait une fois LA RÉALITÉ._ Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as the addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached a kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility may still be honoured with the name of art. (If any votary of “pure art” chances to read this essay, he will say: So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of their age.) II One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which yet, if he could but know it at the beginning, would save him from endless perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the simple fact that _brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking_, that on the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs of duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the _intellectus sibi permissus_ is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute. There has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years than Kant’s; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with a kind of admiration, that I criticise the works of one who to-day has reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.