"I have always loved men," he said. "Why should I not love them since I have always professed to criticise them? Have I misunderstood them? Remember how indulgent I was for all that in them is so far removed from the only thing that I really prize--intelligence. How vulnerable I have been to their instincts! How I have smiled at their innumerable follies! I simply enjoyed studying them, without the slightest partiality, notwithstanding my secret reverence for reason, which seems to me to be a torch lighted at the altar of a god and carefully transmitted by certain privileged beings to certain privileged beings, while yet the chain that they form never succeeds--no one can tell why--in producing an illumination. Therefore, I have never believed that the world belonged to what we have learned to venerate under the name of intelligence. Intelligence is a divine part which no doubt gives us notions of what there is on high, but which has almost no application to things here below. The world is not governed by intelligence. Sometimes intelligence makes converts, and we believe that its reign has come. Illusion! It is precisely then that we are upon the point of falling again into blessed ignorance, and going back to the age of barbarism. Do you know, I am tempted to believe that the age of barbarism is the normal period of humanity! We probably need cruelty, absurdity, injustice, superstition, torrents of bloodshed, in order that the mystery which we admire under the name of life may exist and perpetuate itself. Our bodies can be fed only by offensive means. The majority of human pleasures are unfathomably stupid. The great masses obey certain elementary formulas, sayings of which they have never weighed the meaning, and which often have no meaning. Governments are not carried on by luminous reasoning, but by the allurement of sounding words that flatter the senses. In order to hold our own in a large and influential social group, my poor friend, are we going to be called to admit the timeliness of belief in prophets, in wonder-workers, in ghosts, in the platitudes of 'apparitions,' in the genius of simple minds? Is a torrent of puerility about to inundate the surface of the globe? May it be that this is the indispensable element of reparation? Intelligence, reduced to its own resources, has in fact no power of expansion, no means of action. It is enough to make one die of shame and vexation! Law, justice, liberty--we can imagine men shrugging their shoulders when they hear the words, for the words are efficacious only when they are emptied of their significance and travestied into elementary ideas which naturally lead to the violation of law, liberty, justice. In the matter of ideas men believe only in their tutelary virtue; they are protecting divinities; and the idea is nothing but a word that men symbolize on their flagstaffs, like a fetich. We are as credulous as Homer's warriors. Minerva fights with us. For that matter, I do not think that