[104] Another thinker to whom our empiricists are strangely ungrateful is the author of these words: ‘Consider the danger of one stirring up the enormous masses which form the French nation. Who could restrain the disturbance set up, or foresee all the results it might produce? Even if all the advantages of the new scheme should be indisputable, what man of good sense would dare to undertake to abolish old customs, to change old maxims, and to give a new form to a State other than that it has reached after an existence of 1,300 years?’ (J. J. Rousseau.) [105] See Note M at the end of this book. [106] ‘A truly scientific mind,’ says one of these devotees of fact, ‘feels no need to justify a privilege which appears as an elementary and irreducible datum of the social world.’ (Paul Bourget.) But this same ‘truly scientific’ mind is scandalised at an _insurrection_ against this privilege, which is also an ‘elementary and irreducible datum of the social world’. I shall be told this that insurrection is not a datum of the social world, but of the world of passion where it is most anti-social. And that indeed is the position of this dogmatism: It considers the social _independent of the passionate_, whether the latter has been made social (by Catholic education), or has been reduced to silence by force (school of Maurras) or by skill (school of Bainville). The strangest part of it all is that those who argue in this way about the social _in itself_ accuse their adversaries of dealing in abstractions. [107] The position I am here denouncing has nothing in common with that of a recent school of moralists (Rauh, Lévy-Bruhl) who also desire ‘to take man as he is’, but in order to discover how he may be made better. [108] This pessimism, whatever some of its heralds may say, has nothing in common with the pessimism of the masters of the seventeenth century. La Fontaine and La Bruyère attribute nothing inevitable or eternal to the ills they portray. Let me also point out that in their efforts to discourage hope, the Romantics of Pessimism cannot claim (as M. Georges Goyau has pointed out to them) that they are based on Catholic tradition. [109] Such a group logically comes to declarations like the following, which every supporter of ‘integral nationalism’ is bound to admire: ‘From to-night onwards let there be an end to the silly Utopia where everyone thinks with his own head.’ (Impero, 4th November, 1926.) See Note N at the end of this volume.