Revolutionary socialists make me think of the fellow who, having a piano that was out of tune, would say: "Let's smash this piano and throw the pieces into the fire; in its place we'll install an Aeolian harp." Christianity has already won three great victories: Constantine, the Reform, the Revolution. A fourth is being awaited, Collectivism, after which it is probable that the Strong, wearied at last of being bullied, will revolt against the Weak and reduce them to slavery--once again. Property is necessary; but it is not necessary that it should forever remain in the same hands. To ameliorate and raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,--a cast of comfortable Pariahs. Thought harms the loins. One cannot at the same time carry burdens and ideas. Said Sixtus: "Believe in nothing, not even the trade you follow, not even the hand you caress, the eyes in which you are mirrored, not even yourself,--above all, not in yourself." The true philosopher does not desire to see his ideas applied. He knows that they would be ill carried out, deformed, vulgarized. If need be, he would actually oppose such a course: this has happened. Modesty is a timid confession of pride. The ill are always optimistic. Perhaps optimism itself is an illness. There is a simulation of intelligence, just as there is a simulation of virtue. Mr. X used to say: "Some people need a great deal in order to retain a little; as for me, I need a little to retain a great deal." Science is worth what the scientist is worth. Scholars spread the rumor that science is impersonal. Scholars? They are scholars as much as the masons are architects. The people may make uprisings; but revolutions, never. Revolutions always come from above. Descartes wrote to Balzac: "Every day I walk amidst an immense people, almost as tranquilly as you may walk in your lanes. The men I meet produce upon me the same impression as if I were gazing upon the trees of your forests or the flocks of your country-side." All the weakness of the metaphysicians is explained by these two scornful sentences. In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing. The superstition which, among the ancients, caused them to look upon new-born weaklings, lame, blind and hunchbacked infants, as tokens of divine anger, and to sacrifice them, was happier than the religious or scientific sentimentality that tolerates them, brings them up, making of them half-men and introducing eternal germs of decrepitude among the race. Pity is perhaps at bottom only cowardice. We pity only ourselves or those whom we fear. Nietzsche stupefies. Why? Calm reflection will show that he almost always expresses common-sense truths.