This determination to praise philosophers for their virtues of action rather than for their intellectual virtues is very frequent among men of thought to-day. In his _Souvenirs concernant Lagneau_, Alain, wishing to give as favourable a picture of his master as possible, praises his energy and his resolution at least as much as his intelligence. It is also very remarkable--although here literature only is in question--to see a professor of moral science (M. Jacques Bardoux) setting a special value on those French literary men who were soldiers, i.e. Vauvenargues, Vigny, Péguy. As to the men of letters themselves, I shall content myself with pointing out that one of them who is most applauded by his own colleagues recently declared that he chiefly admired d’Annunzio for his attitude as an officer, and expressed regret that he had returned to literature.[186] The Emperor Julian praised Aristotle for having said that he felt prouder of being the author of his _Treatise on Theology_ than he would have felt if he had destroyed the power of the Persians. One might still find soldiers in France who would agree with this judgment, but very few men of letters. Elsewhere (_Les Sentiments de Critias_, p. 206) I have attempted to give the history and the explanation of this desire (so curious in men of the pen) to exalt a warlike life and to scorn a sedentary life. Note that this characteristic is to be seen in contemporary writers long before the war of 1914, and that those who talk most about a warlike life are not always those who lead it. The new thing, I repeat, is not that we see men of letters praising an active life and scorning a sedentary life; it is _the absence of naiveté, the dogmatic tone_. When Ronsard exclaims: ‘Good Gods, who would praise those who let life go by bent over books’;[187] when Bertrand de Born wishes that ‘no man of high lineage should have any thought but cutting off heads and arms’; when Froissart sings the glories of chivalry and casts his scorn in the faces of the bourgeois, no one will take these candid lyre-players, who like noble poses and do not even know that the word doctrine exists, for the ancestors of our grave professors of belligerent aesthetics. Moreover, I doubt whether the author of _Scenes and Doctrines of Nationalism_ would have condescended to be a descendant of these simple-minded persons. I find scorn for the life of the mind clearly professed in a dogmatic tone, in a writer of the seventeenth century who frequently reminds one of certain modern authors by his efforts to humiliate the toga before the sword. (It is true that this writer was a gentleman of the very minor nobility.)