[79] The adoration of the contingent _for its own sake_; otherwise, and as a step towards the eternal, the knowledge of ‘strange things’ is highly recommended by Leibniz, and even by Spinoza. Renouvier, so hostile to a certain kind of universalism, never bestows philosophical value on a knowledge of what is ‘unique and inexpressible’ in the object. (See G. Séailles, ‘Le Pluralisme de Renouvier,’ _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1925.) He would never have signed this charter of modern metaphysics: ‘That the philosophers since Socrates should have contended as to which should most scorn the knowledge of the particular and should most adore knowledge of the general, is something which passes understanding. For, after all, must not the most honourable knowledge be the knowledge of the most valuable realities! And is there a valuable reality which is not concrete and individual?’ (William James.) [80] An important literary review recently reproached a critic (M. Pierre Lasserre) for his supposed inaptitude to understand ‘contemporary literature’. [81] Curiously enough, these metaphysics of the historic may also be found among the poets. We all know Claudel’s cult of ‘the present minute’ (because it differs from all other minutes in that it is not the extremity of the same quantity of the past); Rimbaud before this said: ‘One must be absolutely modern.’ Moreover, for certain Christians dogma is only valid _relative to a time_. There again particularism seems to have been started by the Germans: ‘No exposition of morality can be the same for all periods of the Christian Church; each possesses full and complete value for a certain period only.’ (Scheiermacher.) On the Germanism in this desire to see everything in its ‘becoming’, see Parodi, _le Problème moral et la Pensée contemporaine_, p. 255. [82] These views on the modern cult of the particular do not seem to me to be invalidated by the arrival of a recent school (Neo-Thomism) which opposes the cult of Being to that of Becoming. According to the leaders of this school, it is clear that, despite certain universalist declarations, human Being really belongs only to them and their group, although in this case the group is wider than the nation. One of them would quite willingly say with a Christian of the second century: ‘We are men; the rest are pigs and dogs.’ Nor do I think I need take into account those particularisms which claim that by working for themselves they are working for the universal, seeing that for them their own group represents the universal. ‘I am Roman, I am human’ (Maurras). ‘I am German, I am human’ (Fichte) and so on.... However, these claims show the prestige of the universal in despite of doctrines. [83] See Note J at the end of this book. [84] On the cult of the ‘Prussian model’ even among the English ‘clerks’, see Elie Halévy, _Histoire du Peuple anglais_, Epilogue, livre ii, ch. i. [85] Sorel, _Le procès de Socrate_.