A fine collection of platitudinous political maxims might be composed by going through Jaur^s's Histoire socialiste. I have never had the patience to read the 1824 pages devoted to the story of the Revolution between August 10, 1792, and the fall of Robespierre; I have simply turned over the leaves of this tedious book, and seen that it contained a mixture of a philosophy worthy of M. Pantalon and a policy fitting a purveyor to the guillotine. For a long time I had reckoned that Jaures would be capable of every ferocity against the vanquished; I saw that I had not been mistaken; but I should not have thought that he was capable of so much platitude: in his eyes the vanquished are always in the wrong, and victory fascinates our great defender of eternal justice so much that he is ready to consent to every proscription demanded of him: *' Revolutions," he says, " claim from a man the most frightful sacrifices, not only of his rest, not only of his life, but of human tenderness and pity." ^ Why write so much, then, about the inhumanity of the executioners of Dreyfus? They also sacrificed " human tenderness " to what appeared to them to be the safety of the country.
A few years ago the Republicans were extremely indignant with the Vicomte de Vogii^, who, when receiving Hanotaux into the French Academy, called the coup d'etat of 1851 ** a somewhat harsh police exploit." ^ » This was on March 24, 1898, at a particularly critical moment of the Dreyfus case, when the Nationalists were asking that agitators and enemies of the army should be swept away. J. Reinach says that De Vogu6 openly invited the army to begin again the work of 1850 (Histoire de V affaire Dreyfus, tome iii. p. 545).
I Jaurds, taught by revolutionary history, now reasons in exactly the same manner as the jovial vicomte; ^ he praises, for example, " the policy of vigour and of wisdom '* which consisted in forcing the Convention to expel the Girondins " with a certain appearance of legality." * The massacres of September 1792 embarrass him somewhat; legality is not very apparent here, but he has big words and bad reasons for every ugly cause; Danton's conduct was not very worthy of admiration at the time of these melancholy happenings, but Jaur^ must excuse him, since Danton was triumphant during this period. '* He did not think it was his duty as a revolutionary and patriotic minister to enter upon a struggle with these misguided popular forces. How can we refine the metal of the bells when they are sounding the alarm of imperilled liberty? " ' It seems to me that Cavaignac might have explained his conduct in the Dreyfus case in the same way. To the people who accused him of being hand in hand with the Anti-Semites, he might have answered that his duty as a patriotic minister did not compel him to enter upon a struggle with the misguided populace, and that on the days when the safety of national defence is at stake we cannot refine the metal of the bells which are soimding the alarm of the country in danger.
When he comes to the period when Camille Desmoulins sought to stir up a movement of opinion strong enough to stop the Terror, Jaur^s speaks energetically against this attempt. He acknowledges, however, a few pages farther on, that the guillotine system could not last for ever; but Desmoulins, having succumbed, is wrong in the eyes of our humble worshipper of success. Jaur^s * De Vogu6 has the habit in his polemics of thanking his adversaries for having given him much amusement; that is why I take the Uberty of calling him jovial, although his writings are rather soporific.
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE J2i accuses the author of the Vieux Cordelier of forgetting the conspiracies, the treasons, the corruptions, and all the dreams with which the Terrorists fed their infatuated imaginations; he is even ironical enough to speak of " free France! " and he brings forth this sentence, worthy of a Jacobin pupil of Joseph Prudhomme: " The knife of Desmoulins was chiselled with an incomparable art; but he planted it in the heart of the Revolution." ^ When Robespierre no longer commands the majority in the Convention he is, as a matter of course, put to death by the other Terrorists, in virtue of the legitimate working of the Parliamentary institutions of that time; but to appeal to mere public opinion against the Government leaders, that was the *' crime " of Desmoulins. His crime was also that committed by Jaur^s at the time he defended Dreyfus against the great leaders of the army and the Government; how many times has not Jaur^ been accused of compromising the national defence? But that time is already a long way off; and our orator at that period, not having yet tasted the advantages of power, did not possess a theory of the State as ferocious as that which he possesses to-day.
I think that I have said sufficient to enable me to conclude that if by chance our Parliamentary Socialists get possession of the reins of Government, they will prove to be worthy successors of the Inquisition, of the Old Regime, and of Robespierre; political courts will be at work on a large scale, and we may even suppose that the unfortunate law of 1848, which abolished the death penalty in poUtical matters, will be repealed. Thanks to this reform, we might again see the State triumphing by the hand of the executioner.
Proletarian acts of violence have no resemblance to these proscriptions; they are purely and simply acts of war; they have the value of military demonstrations, and serve to mark the separation of classes. Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; noncombatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the fields of battle; ^ force is then displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.
The more Syndicalism develops, by abandoning the old superstitions which come to it from the Old Regime and from the Church — through the men of letters, professors of philosophy, and historians of the Revolution, — the more will social conflicts assume the character of a simple struggle, similar to those of armies on campaign. We cannot censure too severely those who teach the people that they ought to carry out the highly idealistic decrees of a progressive justice. Their efforts will only result in the maintenance of those ideas about the State which provoked the bloody acts of '93, whilst the idea of a class war, on the contrary, tends to refine the conception of violence.
IV Syndicahsm in France is engaged on an antimilitarist propaganda, which shows clearly the immense distance which separates it from Parliamentary Socialism in its conception of the nature of the State. Many newspapers believe that all this is merely an exaggerated humanitarian movement, provoked by the articles of Herve; this is a 1 I bring to notice here a fact which is perhaps not very well known: the Spanish war in the time of Napoleon was the occasion of innumerable atrocities, but Colonel Lafaille says that in Catalonia the murders and cruelties were never committed by Spanish soldiers who had been enlisted for some time and had become familiar with the usages of war {Mlmoires sur les campagnes de Catalogne de j8o8 d 1814, pp. 164-165).
great error. We should be misconceiving the nature of the movement if we supposed that it was merely a protest against harshness of discipline, against the length of military service, or against the presence, in the higher ranks, of officers hostile to the existing institutions of the country; ^ these are the reasons which led many middle-class people to applaud declamations against the army at the time of the Dreyfus case, but they are not the Syndicalists' reasons.
The army is the clearest and the most tangible of all possible manifestations of the State, and the one which is most firmly connected with its origins and traditions. Sjmdicalists do not propose to reform the State, as the men of the eighteenth century did; they want to destroy it,* because they wish to realise this idea of Marx's that the Socialist revolution ought not to culminate in the replacement of one governing minority by another minority.^ The Syndicalists outline their doctrine still more clearly when they give it a more ideological aspect, and declare themselves antipatriotic — following the example of the Communist Manifesto, It is impossible that there should be the slightest understanding between Syndicalists and official Socialists on this question; the latter, of course, speak of breaking up everything, but they attack men in power rather than power itself; they hope to possess the State forces, and 1 According to Joseph Reinach, an error was committed after the war in choosing as generals former pupils of the military schools (Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnique). He said that the Jesuit colleges had sent many clericals to the School, and it would have been better to choose instead officers who had risen from the ranks; the generals would have then been less clerical. Loc. cit. pp. 555-556 (I believe that his system would not have had the result he imagined it would).
* " The society which will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will transport the whole machinery of State to where its place will be henceforward — in the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe " (Engels, Les Origines de la SociitS, French trans, p. 281).
* Manifeste communiste, translated, Andler, tome i. p. 39.
they are aware that on the day when they control the Government they will have need of an army; they will carry on foreign politics, and consequently they in their turn will have to praise the feeling of devotion to the fatherland.
Parliamentary Socialists perceive that antipatriotism is deeply rooted in the minds of Socialist workmen, and they make great efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable; they are anxious not to oppose too strongly ideas to which the proletariat has become attached, but at the same time they cannot abandon their cherished State, which promises them so many delights. They have stooped to the most comical oratorical acrobatics in order to get over the difficulty. For instance, after the sentence of the Court of Assizes of the Seine, condemning Herv6 and the antimilitarists, the National Coimcil of the Socialist party passed a resolution branding this " verdict, due to hatred and fear," declaring that a class justice could not " respect liberty of opinion," protesting against the employment of troops in strikes, and affirming " resolutely the necessity for action, and for an international understanding among the workers, for the suppression of war " (Socialiste, January 20, 1906). All this is very clever, but the fundamental question is avoided.
Thus it cannot any longer be contested that there is an absolute opposition between revolutionary Syndicalism and the State; this opposition takes in France the particularly harsh form of antipatriotism, because the politicians have devoted all their knowledge and ability to the task of spreading confusion in people's minds about the essence of Socialism. On the plane of patriotism there can be no compromises and half-way positions; it is therefore on this plane that the Syndicalists have been forced to take their stand when middle-class people of every description employed all their powers of seduction to corrupt Socialism and to alienate the workers from the revolutionary idea. They have been led to deny the idea of patriotism by one of those necessities which are met with at all times in the course of history,* and which philosophers have sometimes great difficulty in explaining — ^because the choice is imposed by external conditions, and not freely made for reasons drawn from the nature of things. This character of historical necessity gives to the existing antipatriotic movement a strength which it would be useless to attempt to dissimulate by means of sophistries. 2 We have the right to conclude from the preceding analysis that Syndicalist violence, perpetrated in the course of strikes by proletarians who desire the overthrow of the State, must not be confused with those acts of savagery which the superstition of the State suggested to the revolutionaries of '93, when they had power in their hands and were able to oppress the conquered — ^following the principles which they had received from the Church and from the Monarchy. We have the right to hope that a Socialist revolution carried out by pure Syndicalists would not be defiled by the abominations which sullied the middle-class revolutions.
1 After the trial of Herve, L6on Daudet wrote: " Those who followed this case were thrilled by the testimonies, by no means theatrical, of the trade union secretaries " {JLihre Parole, December 31, 1905).
* Yet Jaur^s had the audacity to declare in the Chamber on May 11, 1907, that there was only " on the surface of the working-class movement a few paradoxical and outrageous formulas, which originated, not from the negation of the fatherland, but from condemnation of the abuse to which word and idea were so often put." Language hke this could only have been used before an assembly which was entirely ignorant of the working-class movement.
CHAPTER IV I. The confusion in Parliamentary Socialism and the clearness of the general strike — Myths in history — The value of the general strike proved by experience.
II. Researches made to perfect Marxism — Means of throwing light upon it, starting from the point of view of the general strike: class war; preparation for the revolution and absence of Utopias; irrevocable character of the revolution.
III. Scientific prejudices against the general strike; doubts about science — The clear and the obscure parts in thought — Economic incompetence of Parliaments.
Every time that we attempt to obtain an exact conception of the ideas behind proletarian violence we are forced to go back to the notion of the general strike; and this same conception may render many other services, and throw an miexpected Hght on all the obscure parts of Sociahsm. In the last pages of the first chapter I compared the general strike to the Napoleonic battle which definitely crushes an adversary; this comparison will help us to imderstand the part played by the general strike in the world of ideas.
Mihtary writers of to-day, when discussing the new methods of wau: necessitated by the employment of troops infinitely more numerous than those of Napoleon, equipped with arms much more deadly than those of his time, do not for all that imagine that wars will be decided in any other way than that of the Napoleonic battle. The new tactics proposed must fit into the drama Napoleon had conceived; the detailed development of the combat will doubtless be quite different from what it used to be, but the end must always be the catastrophic defeat of the enemy. The methods of military instruction are intended to prepare the soldier for thi& great and terrible action, in which everybody must be ready to take part at the first signal. From the highest to the lowest, the members of a really solid army have always in mind this catastrophic issue of international conflicts.
The revolutionary Syndicates argue about Socialist action exactly in the same manner as military writers argue about war; they restrict the whole of Socialism to the general strike; they look upon every combination as one that should culminate in this catastrophe; they see in each strike a reduced facsimile, an essay, a preparation for the great final upheaval.
The new school, which calls itself Marxist, Syndicahst, and revolutionary, declared in favoiu: of the idea of the general strike as soon as it became clearly conscious of the true sense of its own doctrine, of the consequences of its activity, and of its own originality. It was thus led to leave the old official, Utopian, and political tabernacles, which hold the general strike in horror, and to laimch itself into the true current of the proletarian revolutionary movement; for a long time past the proletariat had made adherence to the principle of the general strike the test by means of which the Socialism of the workers was distinguished from that of the amateur revolutionaries.
Parliamentary Socialists can only obtain great influence if they can manage, by the use of a very confused language, to impose themselves on very diverse groups; for example, they must have working-men constituents simple enough to allow themselves to be duped by high-sovmding phrases i^S REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE about future collectivism; they are compelled to represent themselves as profound philosophers to stupid middleclass people who wish to appear to be well informed about social questions; it is very necessary also for them to be able to exploit rich people who think that they are earning the gratitude of humanity by taking shares in the enterprises of Socialist politicians. This influence is founded on balderdash, and our bigwigs endeavour — sometimes only too successfully — to spread confusion among the ideas of their readers; they detest the general strike because all propaganda carried on from that point of view is too sociaUstic to please philanthropists.
In the mouths of these self-styled representatives of the proletariat all socialistic formulas lose their real sense. The class war still remains the great principle, but it must be subordinated to national solidarity.* IntemationaUsm is an article of faith about which the most moderate declare themselves ready to take the most solenm oaths; but patriotism also imposes sacred duties.* The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves— their newspapers repeat this every day, — but real emancipation consists in voting for a professional politician, in securing for him the means of obtaining a comfortable situation in the world, in subjecting oneself to a leader. In the end the State must disappear — and * The Petit Parisien, which makes a specialty of Socialist and working-class questions, warned strikers on March 31, 1907, that they " must never imagine that they are absolved from the observance of the ordinary social duties and responsibilities."
* At the time when the antimilitarists were beginning to occupy public attention, the Petit Parisien was distinguished by its patriotism: on October 8, 1905, it published an article on " The Sacred Duty " and on " The Worship of this Tricolor Flag which has carried all over the World our Glories and our Liberties "; on January i, 1906, it congratulated the Jury de la Seine: " The flag has been avenged for the insults flung by its detractors on this noble emblem. When it is carried through the streets it is saluted. The juries have done more than bow to it; they have gathered round it with respect." This is certainly very cautious Socialism.
THE PROLETARIAN STRIKE i^p they are very careful not to dispute what Engels has written on this subject — but this disappearance will take place only in a future so far distant that you must prepare yourself for it by using the State meanwhile as a means of providing the politicians with titbits; and the best means of bringing about the disappearance of the State consists in strengthening meanwhile the Governmental machine. This method of reasoning resembles that of Gribouille, who threw himself into the water in order to escape getting wet in the rain.
Whole pages could be filled with the bare outUnes of the contradictory, comical, and quack arguments which form the substance of the harangues of our great men; nothing embarrasses them, and they know how to combine, in pompous, impetuous, and nebulous speeches, the most absolute irreconcilabihty with the most supple opportunism. A learned exponent of Sociahsm has said that the art of reconciling opposites by means of nonsense is the most obvious result which he had got from the study of the works of Marx.i I confess my extreme incompetence in these difficult matters; moreover, I make no claim whatever to be counted among the people upon whom politicians confer the title of learned; yet I cannot easily bring myself to admit that this is the sum and substance of the Marxian philosophy.
The controversy between Jaur^sand Clemenceau demonstrated quite clearly that our Parliamentary Socialists can succeed in deceiving the pubhc only by their equivocation; * Two motions had been discussed at length by the National Council, one proposing that the departmental federations should be invited to enter the electoral struggle wherever it was possible, the other that candidates should be put forward everywhere. One member got up and said, " I should be glad of your earnest attention, for the argument which I am about to state may at first sight appear strange and paradoxical. (These two motions) are not irreconcilable, if we try to solve this contradiction according to the natural Marxian method of solving any contradiction" {Socialiste, October 7, 1905). It seems that nobody understood. And, in fact, it was unintelligible.
and that, as the result of continually deceiving their readers, they have finally lost all sense of honest discussion. In the Aurore of September 4, 1905, Clemenceau accuses Jaur^s of muddling the minds of his partisans " with metaphysical subtleties into which they are incapable of following him "; there is nothing to object to in this accusation, save the use of the word metaphysical; Jaures is no more a metaphysician than he is a lawyer or an astronomer. In the niunber of October 26 Clemenceau proves that his opponent possesses " the art of falsifying his texts," and he ends by saying, " It seemed to me instructive to expose certain polemical practices which we wrongly supposed to be monopoly of the Jesuits."
Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Sociahsm, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons, and which is admired by decadents — revolutionary SyndicaUsm takes its stand, and endeavours, on the contrary, to leave nothing in a state of indecision; its ideas are honestly expressed, without trickery and without mental reservations; no attempt is made to dilute doctrines by a stream of confused commentaries. Syndicalism endeavours to employ methods of expression which throw a full Hght on things, which put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and which bring out the whole value of the forces in play. Oppositions, instead of being glozed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if we desire to obtain a clear idea of the Syndicalist movement; the groups which are struggling one against the other must be shown as separate and as compact as possible; in short, the movements of the revolted masses must be represented in such a way that the soul of the revolutionaries may receive a deep and lasting impression.
These results could not be produced in any very certain manner by the use of ordinary language; use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and THE PROLETARIAN STRIKE jjj before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by SociaHsm against modem society. The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike; there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professors; everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of Socialism is possible. This method has all the advantages which "integral" knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson; and perhaps it would not be possible to cite another example which would so perfectly demonstrate the value of the famous professor's doctrines.^ The possibiUty of the actual realisation of the general strike has been much discussed; it has been stated that the Socialist war could not be decided in one single battle. To the people who think themselves cautious, practical, and scientific the difficulty of setting great masses of the proletariat in motion at the same moment seems prodigious; they have analysed the difficulties of detail which such an enormous struggle would present. It is the opinion of the Socialist-sociologists, as also of the politicians, that the general strike is a popular dream, characteristic of the beginnings of a working-class movement; we have had quoted against us the authority of Sidney Webb, who has decreed that the general strike is an illusion of youth,2 of which the English workers — whom the monopolists of sociology have so often presented to us as the * The nature of these articles will not allow of any long discussion of this subject; but I believe that it would be possible to develop still further the application of Bergson's ideas to the theory of the general strike. Movement, in Bergson's philosophy, is looked upon as an undivided whole; which leads us precisely to the catastrophic conception of Socialism.
■ Bourdeau, Evolution du Socialisme, p. 232, depositaries of the true conception of the working-class movement — soon rid themselves.
That the general strike is not popular in contemporary England, is a poor argument to bring against the historical significance of the idea, for the English are distinguished by an extraordinary lack of understanding of the class war; their ideas have remained very much dominated by medieval influences: the guild, privileged, or at least protected by laws, still seems to them the ideal of working-class organisation; it is for England that the term working-class aristocracy, as a name for the trades unionists, was invented, and, as a matter of fact, trades unionism does pursue the acquisition of legal privileges.^ We might therefore say that the aversion felt by England for the general strike should be looked upon as strong presumptive evidence in favour of the latter by all those who look upon the class war as the essence of Socialism.
Moreover, Sidney Webb enjoys a reputation for competence which is very much exaggerated; all that can be put to his credit is that he has waded through uninteresting blue-books, and has had the patience to compose an extremely indigestible compilation on the history of trades unionism; he has a mind of the narrowest description, which could only impress people unaccustomed to reflection.* Those who introduced his fame into France knew nothing at all about Socialism; and if he is really in the first rank of contemporary authors of economic history, as his translator afiirms,^ it is because the 1 This is seen, for example, in the efforts made by the trade unions to obtain laws absolving them from the civil responsibilities of their acts.
« Tarde could never understand the reputation enjoyed by Sidney Webb, who seemed to him to be a worthless scribbler.
* M6tin, Le Socialisme en Angleterre, p. 210. This writer has received from the Government a certificate of socialism; on July 26, 1904, the French Commissioner-General at the St. Louis exhibition said: " M. Metin is animated by the best democratic spirit; he is an excellent republican; he is even a socialist whom working-class organisaintellectual level of these historians is rather low; moreover, many examples show us that it is possible to be a most illustrious professional historian and yet possess a mind something less than mediocre.
Neither do I attach any importance to the objections made to the general strike based on considerations of a practical order. The attempt to construct hypotheses about the nature of the struggles of the future and the means of suppressing capitalism, on the model furnished by history, is a return to the old methods of the Utopists. There is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically, nor even one which enables us to discuss whether one hypothesis about it is better than another; it has been proved by too many memorable examples that the greatest men have committed prodigious errors in thus desiring to make predictions about even the least distant future.^ And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems for ever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity.
tion should welcome as a friend " {Association ouvrilre, July 30, 1904). An amusing study could be made of those persons who possess certificates of this kind, given to them, either by the Government, the Musie social, or the well-informed press.
* The errors committed by Marx are numerous and sometimes enormous (cf. G. Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo, pp. 31-57).
We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course of his Ufe, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal occupations.^ The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.
The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point. * The hopes which Luther and Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle Ages than to modem times, and the problems which troubled them most occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian renovation? It must be admitted that the real developments of the Revolution did not in any way resemble the enchanting pictures which created the enthusiasm of its first adepts; but without those pictures would the Revolution have been victorious? Many Utopias were mixed up with the Revolutionary myth,^ because it had been formed by a society passionately fond of imaginative literature, full of confidence in the "science,*'* and very little acquainted with the * It has often been remarked that English or American sectarians whose religious exaltation was fed by the apocalyptic myths were often none the less very practical men.
» At the present time, this doctrine occupies an important place in German exegesis; it was introduced into France by the Abbe Loisy. » Cf. the Letter to Daniel Halevy, IV.
* In French petite science. This expression is used to indicate the popular science with which the majority is much more famihar than it economic history of the past. These Utopias came to nothing; but it may be asked whether the Revolution was not a much more profound transformation than those dreamed of by the people who in the eighteenth century had invented social Utopias. In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that, without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his school.
A knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is then of small importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that nothing which they contain will ever come to pass, — as was the case with the catastrophe expected by the first Christians.^ In our own daily life, sire we not familiar with the fact that what actually happens is very different from our preconceived notion of it? And that does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions. Psychologists say that there is heterogeneity between the ends in view and the ends actually realised: the slightest experience of life reveals this law to us, which Spencer transferred into natiure, to extract therefrom his theory of the multipUcation of effects.2 The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken is with the difl&cult researches of the real scientists. These latter are generally as modest as the writers on popular science are vain and boastful.
1 I have tried to show elsewhere how this social myth, which has disappeared, was succeeded by a piety which has remained extremely important in Catholic life; this evolution from the social to the individual, seems to me quite natural in a religion {Le SysUme historique * I beUeve, moreover, that the whole of Spencer's evolutionism is to be explained as an application of the most commonplace psychology to physics, K