Sometimes the modern ‘clerks’ claim that in preaching inhumanity they are only continuing the teaching of their great ancestors, particularly of Spinoza on account of his famous proposition: ‘Pity in itself is bad and useless in a soul which lives according to reason.’ Is it necessary to point out that here pity is depreciated, not to the benefit of inhumanity, but to the benefit of humanity _guided by reason_, because reason alone ‘enables us to give aid to others with certainty’. And Spinoza, determined to stress the fact that for him pity is only inferior to reasoned kindness, adds: ‘It must be fully understood that I am here speaking of the man who lives by reason. For if a man is never led by reason or by pity to go to the assistance of others, then assuredly he deserves the name of inhuman, since he retains no resemblance to a man.’ Let me add that the apostles of harshness cannot claim either that they are supported by the fanatics of justice (Michelet, Proudhon, Renouvier) who, by sacrificing love to justice, do perhaps end up in harshness, but not in a joyous harshness which is precisely the harshness preached by the modern realists, who say--perhaps rightly--that it is the only fertile kind.[129] This extolling of harshness seems to me to have borne more fruit than any other preaching by the modern ‘clerks’. It is a commonplace that among the great majority of the (so-called) thinking young men, in France for instance, harshness is to-day an object of respect, while human love in all its forms is considered a rather laughable thing. These young men have a cult for doctrines which respect nothing but force, pay no attention to the lamentations of suffering and proclaim the inevitability of war and slavery, while they despise those who are revolted by such prospects and desire to alter them. I should like these cults to be compared with the literary aesthetics of these young men, their veneration for certain contemporary novelists and poets in whom the absence of human sympathy reaches a rare pitch of perfection, and whom they plainly venerate, especially for that characteristic. And I should like you to observe the gloomy gravity and arrogance with which these young men subscribe to these ‘iron’ doctrines. It seems to me that the modern ‘clerks’ have created in so-called cultivated society a positive _Romanticism of harshness_.