Romanticism, which I shall call the _Romanticism of Positivism_, the chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover, this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an acquisition of the nineteenth century,[105] i.e. the belief that the teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will come straight out of an examination of the _facts_, viz. desires which have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.[106] Let me add that this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves ‘pure scientists’. (_c_) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions). This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators, professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’, that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the institutions which are dear to them.[107]