There could be no better definition of the type of man for whom things are good insofar as they satisfy his artistic sensibility. Let me place in opposition to him the exactly contrary type, leaving the reader to judge which of the two may claim to belong to ‘the intelligence’:-- ‘... For the perfection of things should be measured by their nature alone, and things are not more or less perfect because they flatter or wound our senses.’ (Spinoza.) _Footnotes_ [1] See Note A at the end of this book. [2] It is to be noted that a little more than a century ago French working-men from different provinces frequently engaged in desperate fights among themselves. (See Martin Nadaud, _Mémoires de Léonard_, p. 93.) [3] See Petit de Julleville, _La Comédie et les Moeurs en France au moyen age_, and André Le Breton, _Le Roman au XVIIe Siècle_. [4] The great novelty is that to-day people accept the position that everything should be political, that they should proclaim it and take a pride in it. Otherwise it is perfectly obvious that men, shopkeepers, or poets, have not waited for the present time to try to get rid of a rival by political means. Remember how La Fontaine’s rivals kept him out of the Académie for ten years. [5] As de Tocqueville profoundly remarks, these only occurred when a first improvement in his condition encouraged the man of the people to want more; i.e. towards the end of the eighteenth century. [6] I am here speaking of Western Jews of the bourgeois class. The Jewish proletariat did not await our time to plunge into the feeling of its racial peculiarity. However, it does so without giving provocation. [7] This was the notion expressed by Benedict XV when he told the poor ‘to take delight in the prosperity of elevated persons and to expect confidently their assistance’. [8] For example, M. Paul Bourget’s _La Barricade_, where the author, a disciple of Georges Sorel, exhorts the bourgeoise not to leave to the proletariat the monopoly of class passion and violence. See also André Beaunier, _Les Devoirs de la Violence_ (quoted by Halperine-Kaminski in the preface to Tolstoi’s book, _The Law of Love and the Law of Violence_). [9] ‘The phrase, _the sublime bourgeois_, which would have caused so much laughter twenty years ago, has now acquired for the French bourgeoisie a mystic plenitude owing to its fusion with the highest social and national values.’ (_Eloge du Bourgeois Français_, p. 284.)