But the modern ‘clerks’ have held up universal truth to the scorn of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the ‘clerks’ have positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere phantom, that there exist only particular truths, ‘Lorrain truths, Provençal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, _true in France_’[78] (the neighbour similarly speaks of what is _true in Germany_), that in other words Pascal had the mind of a clown, and that what is true on one side of the Pyrenees may perfectly well be error on the other side! Humanity hears the same teaching about the classes and learns that there is a bourgeois truth and a working-class truth; better still, that the functioning of our minds should be different according to whether we are working men or bourgeois. The source of your troubles (Sorel teaches the working classes) is that you do not think in the mental way suited to your class. His disciple, Johannet, says the same thing to the capitalist class. Perhaps we shall soon see the results of this truly supreme art of the ‘clerks’ in exasperating the feeling in their differences among the classes. The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’, who proclaim them in a far higher sphere of thought than politics. The metaphysics adopted in the last twenty years by almost all those who think or pretend to think, set up as the supreme state of human consciousness that state--‘duration’--where we succeed in taking cognizance of ourselves in what is most individual, most distinct from everything not ourselves, and in freeing ourselves from those forms of thought (concept, reason, habits of speech) through which we can only become conscious of ourselves in what is common to us and others. These metaphysics put forward as a superior form of cognizance of the world that which grasps each thing by what is unique in it, distinct from every other, and is full of scorn for the mind which seeks to discover general states of being. Our age has seen a fact hitherto unknown, at least from my point of view; and this in metaphysics preaching adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the eternal.[79] Nothing could show better how profound is the modern ‘clerk’s’ desire to exalt the real, the practical side of existence, and to degrade the ideal, the truly metaphysical side. In the history of philosophy this veneration for the individual comes from the German thinkers (Schlegel, Nietzsche, Lotze), while the metaphysical cult of