It follows from all that we have just said that these ideas of political socialism, because they are scientific, dispose their partisans both to _personal tolerance_ and to _theoretical inflexibility_.[83] This is also a conclusion reached by experimental psychology in the domain of philosophy. However great our personal sympathies may be for such or such a representative of the radical faction of the individualist party (as well as for every honorable and sincere representative of any scientific, religious or political opinion whatsoever), we are bound to recognize that there are on the side of socialism no _partiti affini_.[84] It is necessary to be on one side or the other--individualist or socialist. There is no middle ground. And I am constantly growing more and more convinced that the only serviceable tactics for the formation of a socialist party likely to live, is precisely that policy of theoretical inflexibility and of refusing to enter into any "alliance" with _partiti affini_, as such an alliance is for socialism only a "false placenta" for a fetus that is unlikely to live. The conservative and the socialist are the natural products of the individual character and the social environment. One is born a conservative or an innovator just as one is born a painter or a surgeon. Therefore the socialists have no contempt for or bitterness toward the sincere representatives of any faction of the conservative party, though they combat their ideas unrelentingly. If such or such a socialist shows himself intolerant, if he abuses his opponents, this is because he is the victim of a passing emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament; it is, therefore, very excusable. The thing that provokes a smile of pity is to see certain conservatives "young in years, but old in thought"--for conservatism in the young can be nothing but the effect of calculating selfishness or the index of psychical anemia--have an air of complacency or of pity for socialists whom they consider, at best, as "misled," without perceiving that what is normal is for the old to be conservatives, but that young conservatives can be nothing but _egoists_ who are afraid of losing the life of idle luxury into which they were born or the advantages of the orthodox fashion of dividing (?) the fruits of labor. Their hearts at least, if not their brains, are abnormally small. The socialist, who has everything to lose and nothing to gain by boldly declaring his position and principles, possesses by contrast all the superiority of a disinterested altruism, especially when having been born in the aristocratic or the bourgeois class he has renounced the brilliant pleasure of a life of leisure to defend the cause of the weak and the oppressed.[85]