(_a_) _The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past_ (to the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force) in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the _rights_ of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach, like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, _the_ right, and consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the ‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’, of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.[102] To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks here--and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as Germanic--is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the justice of the world.’ (_Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht._) (_b_) The extolling of _policy founded on experience_--by which is meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of Taine or Auguste Comte.[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’ Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack on the Utopians, _Treatise_, I, i.) But he believed he learned from observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.[104] The cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute, they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of