h to be believed. People are
only too ready to believe them. The whole of Germany will be made
responsible for the delirium of a few writers. Germany will one day
realize she has had no more deadly enemy than her own intellectuals.

* * * * *

I write here without prejudice, for I am certainly not proud of our
French intellectuals. The Idol of Race, or of Civilization, or of
Latinity, which they so greatly abuse, does not satisfy me. I do not
like any idol--not even that of Humanity. But at any rate those to which
my country bows down are less dangerous. They are not aggressive, and,
moreover, there remains even in the most fanatical of our intellectuals
a basis of native common sense, of which the Germans of whom I have just
spoken seem to have lost all trace. But it must be admitted that on
neither side have they brought honor to the cause of reason, which they
have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly.
There is a saying of Emerson's which is applicable to their failure:

"_Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own._"

Their acts and their writings have come to them from others, from
outside, from public opinion, blind and menacing. I do not wish to
condemn those who have been obliged to remain silent either because they
are in the armies, or because the censorship which rules in countries
involved in war has imposed silence upon them. But the unheard-of
weakness with which the leaders of thought have everywhere abdicated to
the collective madness has certainly proved their lack of _character_.

Certain somewhat paradoxical passages in my own writings have caused me
at times to be styled an anti-intellectual; an absurd charge to bring
against one who has given his life to the worship of thought. But it is
true that Intellectualism has often appeared to me as a mere caricature
of Thought--Thought mutilated, deformed, and petrified, powerless, not
only to dominate the drama of life, but even to understand it. And the
events of to-day have proved me more in the right than I wished to be.
The intellectual lives too much in the realm of shadows, of ideas.
Ideas have no existence in themselves, but only through the hopes or
experiences which can fill them. They are either summaries, or
hypotheses; frames for what has been or will be; convenient or necessary
formulae. One cannot live and act without them, but the evil is that
people make them into op