But suppose you have not? There are two types of young men that I see before me, and before you also, like two forms of temptation, equally formidable and fatal. One is cynical and usually jovial. He is about twenty years of age, he appraises life at a discount, and his religion consists in enjoying himself--which may be translated by success. Let him be occupied with politics or business, with literature or art, engaged in sport or in industry, let him be officer, diplomat or advocate--his only God is himself; he is his only principle, his only object. He has borrowed from the natural philosophy of the times the great law of vital concurrence, and he applies it to the advancement of his fortune with an ardor of positivism which makes him a civilized barbarian; the most dangerous kind. Alphonse Daudet, who understands so well how to describe him, has christened him the “struggle-for-lifer.” He respects nothing but success, and in success nothing but money. He is convinced when he reads this--for he reads what I write as he reads everything else, if only to be in the current--that I am laughing at the public in tracing this portrait, but that I myself am like him. For he is so profoundly nihilistic in his manner that the Ideal appears to him like a comedy, for example, when he judges it proper to lie to the people to secure their votes. Is not this young man a monster? For one is a monster who is only twenty-five years old and has for a soul a calculating machine in the service of a machine of pleasure.