activities within the bounds of national interests and social order, while the intelligence which allows itself to be guided by the desire for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society, is merely a ‘savage and brutal’ activity, which ‘dishonours the highest of human faculties.’[141] Let me also point out their devotion to the doctrine (Bergson, Sorel) which says that science has a purely utilitarian origin--the necessity of man to dominate matter, ‘knowledge is adaptation’; and their scorn for the beautiful Greek conception which made science bloom from the desire to play, the perfect type of disinterested activity. And then they teach men that to accept an error which is of service to them (the ‘myth’) is an undertaking which does them honour, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them. In other words, as Nietzsche, Barrès and Sorel plainly put it, sensibility to truth in itself apart from any practical aim is a somewhat contemptible form of mind.[142] Here the modern ‘clerk’ positively displays genius in his defence of the material, since the material has nothing to do with the truth, or rather to speak more truly--has no worse enemy. The genius of Callicles in all its profundity lives again in the great masters of the modern soul.[143] Then the modern ‘clerks’ have preached to men the religion of the practical _by means of their theology_, through the image of God they have set before them. First, they determined that God, who since the Stoics has been infinite, should once more become finite, distinct, endowed with a personality, that He should be the affirmation of a _physical_ and not a _metaphysical_ existence. Anthropomorphism, which in the poets from Prudentius to Victor Hugo existed mingled with pantheism without troubling to define the frontiers between them, since God was personal or indeterminate according to the direction of the emotion and the needs of the lyric impulse, rose up in Péguy and Claudel with the most violent consciousness of itself, the clearest desire to be distinguished from its acolyte and to express contempt for him. At the same time the political teachers attacked the religion of the Infinite with a precision of hatred, a skill in depreciation, unparalleled even in the Church, which consisted in denouncing this religion precisely because it is not practical, because it saps away the feelings which found the great earthly realities: the City and the State.[144] But the modern ‘clerks’ have above all endowed God with the attributes which secure practical advantages. It may be said that, since the Old Testament, God was far more just than strong, or rather that, as Plato thought, His strength was only a form of His justice; and His power, as Malebranche and Spinoza put it, had nothing in common with the power of kings and Empire-builders. The desire to increase was implicitly excluded from His nature, as well as the moral attributes