(_d_) _The cult of success_, I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt. This philosophy which is professed by many a modern teacher in political life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a large number in France since de Maistre) is also professed in private life, and has borne its fruits there. In the so-called thinking world to-day there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all who ‘succeed’ and their scorn for all who fail. One moralist places to the credit of Napoleon’s greatness of soul his contempt for ‘the unlucky’; others do the same thing in regard to Mazarin, Vauban, Mussolini. It cannot be denied that the ‘clerks’ are thereby keeping an excellent school of realism, since the cult of success and the contempt for misfortune are obviously admirable moral conditions for obtaining material advantages. Nor can it be denied that this teaching is entirely new among them, especially among the ‘clerks’ of the Latin races, I mean those whose ancestors had taught mankind to honour merit apart from its achievements, to honour Hector as much as Achilles, the Curiatii more than their successful rivals.[132] We have just seen that the modern moralists extol the warrior at the expense of the man of justice. They also extol him at the expense of the man of learning and, there again, they preach to the world the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life. We all know Nietzsche’s hue and cry against the man of the study, the man of erudition, ‘the mirror man,’ whose only passion is to understand. And also Nietzsche’s esteem for the life of the mind solely insofar as it is emotion, lyricism, action, partiality; his derisive laughter at ‘objective’ methodical research devoted to ‘the horrible old woman known as truth’. And we know Sorel’s denunciations of societies which ‘give a privileged place to the amateurs of _purely intellectual things_’;[133] those of Barrès, Lemaître, Brunetière, thirty years ago, intimating to the ‘intellectuals’ that they are a type of humanity ‘inferior to the soldier’; those of Péguy, who admires philosophies to the extent that ‘they are good fighters’, and admires Descartes because he was in the army, and the dialecticians of French monarchism solely because they are ready to be killed for the sake of their views.[134] I shall be told that most often this is the mere wild talk of men of letters, the posturing of lyricists, to which it is unjust to attribute a dogmatic meaning; that Nietzsche, Barrès and Péguy denounce the life of study on account of their poetic temperaments, their aversion from everything lacking in picturesqueness and the spirit of adventure, and not their resolution to abase disinterestedness. To which I reply that