To sum up, I do not so far see in Illuminism a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity, but rather a movement finding its principal dynamic force in the ancient spirit of revolt against the existing social and moral order, aided and abetted perhaps by Jews who saw in it a system that might be turned to their own advantage. Meanwhile, Illuminism made use of every other movement that could serve its purpose. As the contemporary de Luchet has expressed it: The system of the Illuminés is not to embrace the dogmas of a sect, but to turn all errors to its advantage, to concentrate in itself everything that men have invented in the way of duplicity and imposture. More than this, Illuminism was not only the assemblage of all errors, of all ruses, of all subtleties of a theoretic kind, it was also an assemblage of all practical methods for rousing men to action. For in the words of von Hammer on the Assassins, that cannot be too often repeated: Opinions are powerless so long as they only confuse the brain without arming the hand. Scepticism and free-thinking as long as they occupied only the minds of the indolent and philosophical have caused the ruin of no throne.... It is nothing to the ambitious man what people believe, but it is everything to know how he may turn them for the execution of his projects. This was what Weishaupt so admirably understood; he knew how to take from every association, past and present, the portions he required and to weld them all into a working system of terrible efficiency--the disintegrating doctrines of the Gnostics and Manicheans, of the modern philosophers and Encyclopædists, the methods of the Ismailis and the Assassins, the discipline of the Jesuits and Templars, the organization and secrecy of the Freemasons, the philosophy of Machiavelli, the mystery of the Rosicrucians--he knew moreover, how to enlist the right elements in all existing associations as well as isolated individuals and turn them to his purpose. So in the army of the Illuminati we find men of every shade of thought, from the poet Goethe[602] to the meanest intriguer--lofty idealists, social reformers, visionaries, and at the same time the ambitious, the rancorous, and the disgruntled, men swayed by lust or embittered by grievances, all these differing in their aims yet by Weishaupt's admirable system of watertight compartments precluded from a knowledge of these differences and all marching, unconsciously or not, towards the same goal.