ht.

It remains the vain guardian of a demonetised treasure. If only
this mistake were a harmless one; but ideas that are not constantly
confronted with reality, which are not frequently dipped into the
stream of experience, grow dry, and take on a toxic character. They
throw a heavy shadow over the new life, bring on the night and produce
fever. What a stupid thraldom to abstract words! Of what use is it to
dethrone kings and by what right do we jeer at those who die for their
masters, if it is only to put tyrannic entities in their places, which
we adorn with their tinsel? It is much better, to have a flesh and
blood monarch, whom you can control--suppress if necessary--than these
abstractions, these invisible despots, that no one knows now, nor ever
has known. We deal only with the head Eunuchs, the priests of the
hidden Crocodile, as Taine calls him, the wire-pulling ministers who
speak in the idol's name.--Ah! let us tear away the veil and know the
creature hidden inside of us. There is less danger when man shows
frankly as a brute than when he drapes himself in a false and sickly
idealism. He does not eliminate his animal instincts, he only deifies
and tries to explain them, but as this cannot be done without
excessive simplification--according to the law of the mind which
in order to grasp must let go an equal amount--he disguises and
intensifies them in one direction. Everything that departs from the
straight line or that interferes with the strict logic of his mental
edifice, he denies; worse he pulls it up by the roots, and commands
that it be destroyed in the name of sacred principles. It therefore
follows that he cuts down much of the infinite growth of nature, and
allows to stand only the trees of the mind that he chooses--generally
those that flourish in deserts and ruins and which there grow
abnormally. Of such is the crushing predominance of one single
tyrannous form of the Family, of Country, and of the narrow morality
which serves them. The poor creature is proud of it all; and it is he
who is the victim.

Humanity does not dare to massacre itself from interested motives. It
is not proud of its interests, but it does pride itself on its ideas
which are a thousand times more deadly. Man sees his own superiority
in his ideas, and will fight for them; but herein I perceive his
folly, for this warlike idealism is a disease peculiar to him, and its
effects are similar to those of alcoholism; they add enor