Among the causes of this new attitude among men of letters I must point to their thirst for sensations, their need to experience things, which in recent times have grown stronger and have caused them to adopt a political attitude which gave them emotions and sensations. Belphegor is not the only star in the literary heavens. A French writer, who was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to History; and he replied, ‘I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a fanfare of trumpets.’ The same thinker gives us to understand that his chief motive in ‘seeking contact with national minds’ was to ‘throw more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down’.[161] I do not think I am mistaken when I say that numbers of our moralists who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter an opportunity for sensations.[162] You will recollect the remark of a young thinker, quoted by Agathon in 1913: ‘Why not a war? It will be amusing.’ I shall be told that this is the mere extravagant saying of a young man. But what of this remark from a man of fifty, and what is more, a scientist (R. Quinton), who saw the tragedy of 1914 coming, and exclaimed: ‘We shall picnic on the grass!’? This scientist was certainly a good soldier, but no more so than Fresnel and Lamarck, of whom I dare to say that they may have approved of war, but not because it satisfied their taste for the picturesque. All who frequented the author of _Reflexions sur la Violence_ know that one of the greatest attractions of any idea for him was that it was ‘amusing’ and likely to exasperate so-called reasonable people. There are many thinkers of the past fifty years whose ‘philosophy’ has one fundamental motive--the pleasure of throwing off irritating paradoxes; while they are only too happy if their rockets fall like swords and satisfy that need for cruelty which they profess as the sign of noble minds. This prodigious decline of morality, this sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism, is usually and quite openly accompanied by a huge contempt for the true ‘clerk’, whose joy comes from the exercise of thought and who disdains sensation, particularly the sensations of action. Here again the new political cult of the men of letters is the result of a modification in the most intimate part of their mind, the very same modification we have been discussing, i.e. a decline of intellectual discipline, which does not mean a decline in intelligence.[163]