There is here a manifest abuse of the word _realism_. Taine threw light on the true nature of the real, or rather the political real, and reminded the universalist that this domain is not under his jurisdiction. He never _exalted_ this real at the expense of the universal, which is the realism I am denouncing here. He plainly taught, on the contrary, that the universalist who stays in his own domain (see his admiration for Spinoza and Goethe) is the great human model. Compare this with Maurras for whom the universalist, even when non-political (the infinitist, the pantheist) is profoundly contemptible. It is also difficult for me to see Taine as the godfather of those who glorify the soldier at the expense of the man of justice and the man of study,[182] who exhort the nations to cultivate their prejudices where they are ‘totally foreign to reason’ (Barrès) and who declare that the intelligence which cares nothing about what is social is the activity of a savage. I think Taine would cheerfully say of those who claim to derive from him the same thing that M. Bergson is reported to have said of some of his ‘disciples’: ‘These gentlemen are most original.’ Nevertheless, Taine seems to me to be the initiator of the modern realists in two points. The first is his condemnation of individualism, more exactly, of the moral liberty of the citizen (for this, at bottom, is the meaning of his regret for the old corporations, and, more generally, of his exhortation to form groups, which shape the individual’s soul, instead of allowing it to be autonomous as against the State); and the second, which is far more novel than the first among French teachers, is his condemnation of idealist education. The peroration of the ‘_Régime moderne_’ obviously establishes the whole educational argument of the _Déracines_ and _L’Étape_:-- ‘Sometimes when he is with his intimates, as bitter and as overfatigued as he is, the young man is tempted to say to us: “By your education you induced us to believe that the world is made in a certain way. You deceived us. It is much uglier, stupider, dirtier, gloomier and harsher, at least to our sensibility and our imagination. You think they are over-excited and out of gear; well, if they are, it is your fault. That is why we curse and despise the whole of your world, and reject your pretended truths, which for us are lies, including those elementary and primary truths which you say are evident to common sense, and upon which you build your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, your sciences and your arts.” That is what contemporary youth have been telling us aloud for fifteen years by their tastes, their opinions, their inclinations in literature, the arts and life.’ Against this manifesto in favour of a practical education, let me set this protest of a true descendant of Montaigne, Pascal and Montesquieu: