During fifty years, especially in France (see Barrès and Bourget) a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, i.e. as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence knows what we ought to do--as individuals, as a nation, as a class--to secure our own advantage. These writers have eagerly expatiated on the example of the insect whose ‘instinct’ (it appears) teaches it to strike its prey precisely in the spot which will paralyse it without killing it, so that its offspring may feed on the living prey and develop better.[137] Other teachers denounce this ‘barbarous’ extolling of instinct in the name of ‘the French tradition’ and preach ‘the superiority of the intelligence’; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required by our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical. This brings us to one of the most remarkable and certainly the most novel forms of this preaching of the practical by the modern ‘clerks’. I mean that teaching according to which _intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone_. It may be said that since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Plato’s famous hymn to geometry, where that discipline is venerated more than all others because for him it represents the type of speculative thought which brings in nothing material; and with Renan’s verdict which declares that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity.[138] By this standard of values the ‘clerks’ put before the laymen the spectacle of a class of men for whom the value of life lies in its disinterestedness, and they acted as a check on--or at least shamed--the laymen’s practical passions. The modern ‘clerks’ have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim that intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of a concrete advantage, and that the intelligence which takes no interest in its objects is a contemptible activity. They teach that the superior form of the intelligence is that which thrusts its roots into ‘the vital urge’, occupied in discovering what is most valuable in securing our existence. In historical[139] science especially, they honour the intelligence which labours under the guidance of political interests,[140] and they are completely disdainful of all efforts towards ‘objectivity’. Elsewhere they assert that the intelligence to be venerated is that which limits its