tive, palpable experience
would open anybody's eyes; his are closed through prejudice or interest;
even physical truth finds no access to his mind, because he is unable to
comprehend it, or because he has to keep it out. He must, accordingly,
be either obtuse or a charlatan. Actually he is both, for both combine
to form the pedant (cuistre), that is to say, the hollow, inflated mind
which, filled with words and imagining that these are ideas, revels in
its own declamation and dupes itself that it may dictate to others.

Such is his title, his personality and role. In this artificial and
declamatory tragedy of the Revolution he takes the leading part;
the maniac and the barbarian slowly retire in the background on the
appearance of the cuistre; Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or
efface themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who attracts all
the attention.[3187]--If we want to understand him we must look at him
as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the last stage of
a dying intellectual vegetation, on the last branch of the eighteenth
century, he is the final freak and dried fruit of the classical
spirit.[3188] He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy
but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulae, the formulae of
Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning "the people, nature,
reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality," a ready-made
vocabulary,[3189] expressions too ample, the meaning of which,
ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of the disciple. He
never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches are merely long
strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling fact in them, no
distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye evoking a living
image, no personal, special observation, no clear, frank original
impression. It might be said of him that he never saw anything with his
own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that false conceptions
have intervened and fixed themselves between him and the object;[3190]
he combines these in logical sequence, and simulates the absent thought
by an affected jargon, and this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of
him likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but none of them spout
and spread out so complacently and lengthily as he. For hours, we grope
after him in the vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold
and perplexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make
som