On their own showing, many modern ‘clerks’ have adopted these realist doctrines because they want to have done with the moral disarray into which they are thrown by the spectacle of philosophies, ‘none of which bring certainty,’ and which all collapse upon each other as they cry to heaven their contradictory absolutes. There again the ‘clerk’s’ political attitude is the result of a great decline in his intellectual discipline, whether we consider that this decline is shown by his belief that any philosophy can bring certainty, or whether we think that it lies in his inability to stand upright on the ruins of the schools, devoting himself to reason, which is above all the schools, and is their judge. I shall also admit as one other cause of realism in the modern ‘clerks’ the irritation produced in them by the teaching of some of their predecessors--I mean certain masters of the year 1848, with their visionary idealism, their belief that justice and love were suddenly about to become the essence of the soul of nations, an irritation greatly increased by seeing the dreadful contrast between these idyllic prophecies and the events which followed them. Nevertheless, the point to remember is that the modern ‘clerks’ replied to these errors by hurling anathemas at every sort of idealism, whether visionary or not, thereby showing incapacity to distinguish between species, inability to rise above passion to judgment. And this is but one other aspect of their loss of the good manners of the mind. Let me recapitulate the causes for this change in the ‘clerks’: The imposition of political interests on all men without any exception; the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions; the desire and the possibility for men of letters to play a political part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play the game of a class which is daily becoming more anxious; the increasing tendency of the ‘clerks’ to become bourgeois and to take on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism; the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual discipline. It will be seen that these causes arise from certain phenomena which are most profoundly and generally characteristic of the present age. The political realism of the ‘clerks’, far from being a superficial fact due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me bound up with the very essence of the modern world. IV _Summary--Predictions_