I sincerely hope that no intelligent reader will overlook this sceptical attitude of Gobineau towards religion, because that is a point of great importance at the present time, when our faith will certainly thrive again on a misfortune, which, by the propagation of slave-values, it indirectly has caused. It is this scepticism against the Church and its Semitic values, which separates a Gobineau from Disraeli, to whom otherwise—in his rejection of Buckle, Darwin, and their science, in his praise of Race and Aristocracy, and in his prophecy of evil—he is so nearly related. Disraeli still believed in a Church based upon a revival of the old principles, Gobineau, like Nietzsche, had no hope whatever in this respect. It is the great merit of both Nietzsche and Gobineau, that they were not, like Disraeli, trying to revive a corpse, but that they frankly acknowledged, the one that the corpse was dead, the other that it was positively poisoning the air. The occasional bows which Gobineau makes to the Church cannot, I repeat, mislead any serious critics of his work, especially if they likewise consult his later books, about which, by the way, I have spoken at greater length elsewhere.[1] Both Spinoza and Montaigne had the same laudable habit, and they did not mean it either. For the first business of a great freethinker is not to be mistaken for a little one; his greatest misfortune is to be “understood” by the wrong class of people, and thus an occasional bow to the old and venerable Power—apart from the safety which it procures—protects him from an offensive handshake with enthusiastic and unbalanced disciples and apostles. OSCAR LEVY GENEVA, _July 1915_ FROM THE AUTHOR’S DEDICATION (1854)[2] TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE V, KING OF HANOVER The great events—the bloody wars, the revolutions, and the breaking up of laws—which have been rife for so many years in the States of Europe, are apt to turn men’s minds to the study of political problems. While the vulgar consider merely immediate results, and heap all their praise and blame on the little electric spark that marks the contact with their own interests, the more serious thinker will seek to discover the hidden causes of these terrible upheavals. He will descend, lamp in hand, by the obscure paths of philosophy and history; and in the analysis of the human heart or the careful search among the annals of the past he will try to gain the master-key to the enigma which has so long baffled the imagination of man.