these poets give themselves out as serious thinkers (notice their tone, _quite free from_ naiveté); that the immense majority of their readers accept them as such; that, even if it were true that in depreciating the man of study their motive is not to abase disinterestedness, it is none the less true in fact that the manner of living they hold up to the laughter of mankind happens to be the very type of the disinterested life, while the life they extol at its expense is the very type of practical activity (at least more practical than that of the man of study, for it will be admitted that the activity of du Guesclin and Napoleon is more likely to acquire material advantages than the activity of Spinoza and Mabillon); that, moreover, what these thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who lays no foundations, who does not conquer, who does not predicate the capture of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it, as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his discoveries to others. In Nietzsche, the scorn for the man of study to the benefit of the warrior is only an episode in a desire which nobody will deny inspires the whole of his work as well as the work of Sorel, Barrès and Péguy: _The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action._[135] To-day this desire inspires not only the moralist, but another kind of ‘clerk’ who speaks from much higher ground. I am referring to that teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour the active and _willing_ part of himself with all his devotion. The theory of knowledge from which humanity has taken its values during the past half century assigns a secondary rank to the mind which proceeds by clear and distinct ideas, by categories, by words, and places in the highest rank the mind which succeeds in liberating itself from these intellectual habits and in becoming conscious of itself insofar as it is a ‘pure tendency’, a ‘pure will’, a ‘pure activity’. Philosophy which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think, therefore I am’, now raises him to say, ‘I am, therefore I think’, ‘I think, therefore I am not’ (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action). Formerly philosophy taught him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles the soul of Pythagoras linking up concepts; now she informs him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles that of the small chicken breaking its eggshell.[136] From his loftiest pulpit the modern ‘clerk’ assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical.