[141] As is well known, this is the argument of the ‘Avenir de l’intelligence’. It allows followers to say (‘Manifeste de l’Intelligence,’ _Figaro_, 19th July, 1919; on this manifesto, see Note P at the end of this volume) that ‘one of the most obvious missions of the Church during the ages has been to protect the intelligence against its own errors’--an irrefutable saying from the moment that the errors of the intelligence are everything it says without reference to social order (whose basis is to be the teaching of the Church). This practical conception of the intelligence leads to definitions of this sort: ‘True logic is to be defined as the normal union of feelings, images and signs, to inspire in us the conceptions suited to our moral, intellectual and physical needs.’ (Maurras.) Compare this with the tradition teaching of the French masters: ‘Logic is the art of guiding reason properly in the knowledge of things.’ (_Logique de Port-Royal._) The wish to esteem intelligence according to its practical results appears again in this astounding formula: ‘A critical mind is of value _through the influence it exerts_ by means of the enlightenment it bestows.’ (Maurras.) See also how severe is M. Massis (_Jugements_, i, 87) for Renan when he says: ‘The useful is what I abhor.’ Elsewhere (_Jugements_, 107) the same thinker speaks of a spiritual freedom ‘whose disinterestedness is merely a refusal of the conditions of life, of action, _and of thought_!’ [142] They add ‘and unscientific’, which is irrefutable as soon as science means ‘practical’. ‘Bringing up children religiously,’ says M. Paul Bourget, ‘is bringing them up scientifically’--a very defensible saying as soon as ‘scientifically’ means (as the author here wants it to mean) ‘in conformity with the national interest’. [143] The French traditionalists condemn the truth in itself in the name of ‘social’ truth. This is the _glorification of prejudices_, a new thing indeed in the descendants of Montaigne and Voltaire. It may be said that certain contemporary French masters show a zeal in defending the interests of society never seen before in those whose business was to defend the interests of the mind. The condemnation of disinterested intellectual activity is plainly laid down in this command of Barrès: ‘All questions must be solved in relation to France,’ to which a German thinker replies in 1920, ‘All the conquests of ancient and modern culture and of science are looked at by us from the German point of view before everything.’ (Quoted by C. Chabot, Preface to the French translation of _Speeches to the German Nation_, page xix). For the cult of the ‘useful error’, see an amazing page in the _Jardin de Bérénice_, quoted and commented on by Parodi. (_Traditionalisme et Democratie_, page 136.)