[161] This same Barrès is quoted as having said to a ‘Dreyfusist’ in 1898: ‘Why do you talk of justice and humanity to me! What do I care for? A few pictures in Europe and a few cemeteries!’ Another of our great political realists confessed one day to his fundamental necessity to ‘enjoy’. Socrates long ago told Protagoras that the basis of his doctrine was a thirst for sensation. [162] It seems to me difficult to deny that pacifism, humanitarianism, and altruism are _boring_. No doubt, art, science, and philosophy offer sufficient opportunities for ‘amusement’ without one asking of it doctrines which set the world on fire. But that is the view of a man who is not wildly eager for sensation. [163] The realists are not the only people to-day who find opportunities for sensation in their political attitudes. It is certain that the humanitarianism of Victor Hugo and Michelet is far from having the pure intellectual resonance it had in Spinoza and Malebranche. (See above, my distinction between humanitarianism and humanism.) [164] ‘Peace it not the absence of war, but a virtue born from strength of soul.’ (Spinoza.) [165] Here is an example: ‘Universal peace will come about one day, not because men will become better (one cannot hope for that) but because a new order of things, new science, new economic needs, will impose a state of peace on them, just as the very conditions of their existence formerly placed and maintained them in a state of war.’ (Anatole France, _Sur la Pierre blanche_.) Note the refusal, mentioned above, to believe in any possible betterment of the human soul. [166] This observation applied to nearly all anti-militarist literature up to our own times. We have to come to Renan and Renouvier (at least among writers not of the Church) to find authors who speak of war and national passions with the seriousness and respect due to such dramas. [167] I am not to say whether the claims of France after her victory might have been _impolitic_, for the thinkers I am discussing here only speak of what they consider their _immorality_. Notice that the pacifism of the Church, at least among the great teachers, is not at all inspired by sentimental considerations, but by pure moral education. ‘What do we condemn in war?’ says Saint Augustin. ‘Is it the fact that they kill men who have all one day to die? Only cowards, not religious men, would bring this accusation against war. What we condemn in war is the desire to do harm, an implacable soul, the fury of reprisals, the passion for dominion.’ (This is taken up by Thomas Aquinas in the _Summum_, 2, 2, xl, art. 1.)