Add also the sovereignty the artist now attributes to his desires and their satisfaction (the ‘rights of genius’) and, consequently, his natural hatred for systems which limit each person’s liberty of action by that of others. And finally add the artist’s aversion from everything which is general, everything which is only the object of conception, not of sensation.[158] The determination of men of letters to pass judgment only in accordance with their artistic sensibility is only one aspect of their desire (since Romanticism) to exalt feeling at the expense of thought, a desire which itself is one among the thousand results of the decline of intellectual discipline among them. The new political attitude of the ‘clerks’ seems to me to be here the result of a serious modification of their state of mind. This attitude also seems to me to result from the decline of the study of classical literature in the formation of their minds. The humanities, as the word implies, have always taught the cult of humanity in its universal aspect, at least since the time of the Portico.[159] The decline of Graeco-Roman culture in Barrès and his literary generation, in comparison with that of Taine, Renan, Hugo, Michelet, even Anatole France and Bourget, is undeniable. Still less will it be denied that this decline is considerably more noticeable in Barrès’s successors. However, this decline does not prevent these writers from extolling classical studies, but they do not do this with the idea of reviving the cult for what is human in its universal aspect, but on the contrary to strengthen the ‘French’ mind, or at least the ‘Latin’ mind, in the grasp of its own roots, in consciousness of itself as distinct from other minds. Notice that this decline of classical culture in the French writers coincides with the discovery of the great German realists, Hegel and especially Nietzsche, whose genius had the more effect on these Frenchmen because their lack of classical discipline deprived them of the one real barrier which can be opposed to that genius.[160]