e themselves on men apart from reason and have the
power to polarize men's thoughts and feelings in one direction. Pure
reason had never such a power, for men were never impassioned by reason.

The religious forms rapidly assumed by the Revolution explain its power
of expansion and the prestige which it possessed and has retained. Few
historians have understood that this great monument ought to be regarded
as the foundation of a new religion. The penetrating mind of
Tocqueville, I believe, was the first to perceive as much. He wrote:

The French Revolution was a political revolution which operated
in the manner of and assumed something of the aspect of a
religious revolution. See by what regular and characteristic
traits it finally resembled the latter; not only did it spread
itself far and wide like a religious revolution, but, like the
latter, it spread itself by means of preaching and propaganda.
A political revolution which inspires proselytes, which is
preached as passionately to foreigners as it is accomplished at
home: consider what a novel spectacle was this.

Although the mystic element is always the foundation of beliefs, certain
affective and rational elements are quickly added thereto. A belief thus
serves to group sentiments and passions and interests which belong to
the affective domain. Reason then envelops the whole, seeking to justify
events in which, however, it played no part whatever.

At the moment of the Revolution everyone, according to his aspirations,
dressed the new belief in a different rational vesture. The peoples saw
in it only the suppression of the religious and political despotisms and
hierarchies under which they had so often suffered. Writers like Goethe
and thinkers like Kant imagined that they saw in it the triumph of
reason. Foreigners like Humboldt came to France "to breathe the air of
liberty and to assist at the obsequies of despotism." These intellectual
illusions did not last long. The evolution of the drama soon revealed
the true foundations of the dream.

_b. Bolshevism_[311]

Great mass movements, whether these be religious or political, are at
first always difficult to understand. Invariably they challenge existing
moral and intellectual values, the revaluation of which is, for the
normal mind, an exceedingly difficult and painful task. Moreover the
definition of their aims and policies into exact and comprehensive
progra