This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of _Pragmatism_ whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.[110] I should like to point out certain particularly remarkable aspects of this preaching, which are probably not sufficiently realized. I said that the modern ‘clerks’ teach man that his desires are moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the surrounding world.[111] In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set himself in Nature ‘like an empire within an empire’; the latter exhorts him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, ‘We desire now to feel conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.’ The former, like the master of the _Contemplations_, said: ‘Believe, but not in ourselves’; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: ‘Believe, and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.’ Nevertheless, the real originality of Pragmatism is not in that. Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes: Pragmatism exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of matter. (See the glorifications of the _homo faber_ by Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson.)