He stayed in the house for several days, for this first contact with the outside world had depressed him, and the friend on whom he had relied for guidance had failed him miserably. He was much troubled, for Clerambault was weak and unused to stand alone. Poet as he was, and absolutely sincere, he had never felt it necessary to think independently of others; he had let himself be carried along by their thought, making it his own, becoming its inspired voice and mouthpiece. Now all was suddenly changed. Notwithstanding that night of crisis, his doubts returned upon him; for after fifty a man’s nature cannot be transformed at a touch, no matter how much the mind may have retained the elasticity of youth. The light of a revelation does not always shine, like the sun in a clear summer sky, but is more like an arc-light, which often winks and goes out before the current becomes strong. When these irregular pulsations fade out, the shadows appear deeper, and the spirit totters and then.⁠ ⁠… It was hard for Clerambault to get along without other people. + 

He decided to visit all his friends, of whom he had many, in the literary world, in the University, and among the intelligent bourgeoisie. He was sure to find some among them who, better than he, could divine the problems which beset him, and help him in their solution. + 

Timidly, without as yet betraying his own mind, he tried to read theirs, to listen and observe; but he had not realised that the veil had fallen from his eyes; and the vision that he saw of a world, once well-known to him, seemed strange and cold. + 

The whole world of letters was mobilised; so that personalities were no longer to be distinguished. The universities formed a ministry of domesticated intelligence; its functions were to draw up the acts of the State, its master and patron; the different departments were known by their professional twists. + 

The professors of literature were above all skilful in developing moral arguments oratorically under the three terms of the syllogism. Their mania was an excessive simplification of argument; they put high-sounding words in the place of reason, and made too much of a few ideas, always the same, lifeless for lack of colour or shading. They had unearthed these weapons of a so-called classic antiquity, the key to which had been jealously guarded throughout the ages by academic mamelukes, and these eloquent antiquated ideas were falsely called Humanities, though in many respects they offended the common sense and the heart of humanity as it is today. Still they bore the hallmark of Rome, prototype of all our modern states, and their authorised exponents were the State rhetoricians. + 

The philosophers excelled in abstract constructions; they had the art of explaining the concrete by the abstract, the real by its shadow. They systematised some hasty partial observations, melted them in their alembics, and from them deduced laws to regulate the entire world. They strove to subject life, multiple and many-sided, to the unity of the mind, that is, to their mind. The timeserving trickeries of a sophistical profession facilitated this imperialism of the reason; they knew how to handle ideas, twisting, stretching, and tying them together like strips of candy; it would have been child’s play for them to make a camel pass through the eye of a needle. They could also prove that black was white, and could find in the works of Emanuel Kant the freedom of the world, or Prussian militarism, just as they saw fit. + 

The historians were the born scribes, attorneys, and lawyers of the Government, charged with the care of its charters, its title-deeds, and cases, and armed to the teeth for its future quarrels.⁠ ⁠… What is history after all? The story of success, the demonstration of what has been done, just or unjust. The defeated have no history. Be silent, you Persians of Salamis, slaves of Spartacus, Gauls, Arabs of Poitiers, Albigenses, Irish, Indians of both Americas, and colonial peoples generally!⁠ ⁠… When a worthy man revolting against the injustices of his day, puts his hope in posterity by way of consolation, he forgets that this posterity has but little chance to learn of former events. All that can be known is what the advocates of official history think favourable to the cause of their client, the State. A lawyer for the adverse party may possibly intervene⁠—someone of another nation, or of an oppressed social or religious group; but there is small chance for him; the secret is kept too well! + 

Orators, sophists, and pleaders, the three corporations of the Faculty of Letters⁠—Letters of State, signed and patented! + 

The studies of the “scientifics” ought to have protected them better from the suggestions and contagions of the outside world⁠—that is, if they confined themselves to their trade. Unfortunately they have been tempted from it, for the applied sciences have taken so large a place in practical affairs that experts find themselves thrown into the foremost ranks of action, and exposed to all the infections of the public mind. Their self-respect is directly interested in the victory of the community, which can as easily assimilate the heroism of the soldier as the follies and falsehoods of the publicist. Few scientific men have had the strength to keep themselves free; for the most part they have only contributed the rigour, the stiffness of the geometrical mind, added to professional rivalries, always more acute between learned bodies of different nationalities. + 

The regular writers, poets, and novelists, who have no official ties, they, at least should have the advantages of their independence; but unfortunately few of them are able to judge for themselves of events which are beyond the limits of their habitual preoccupations, commercial or aesthetic. The greater number, and not the least known, are as ignorant as fishes. It would be best for them to stick to their shop, according to their natural instinct; but their vanity has been foolishly tickled, and they have been urged to mix themselves up with public affairs, and give their opinion on the universe. They can naturally have but scattering views on such subjects, and in default of personal judgment, they drift with the current, reacting with extreme quickness to any shock, for they are ultra-sensitive, with a morbid vanity which exaggerates the thoughts of others when it cannot express their own. This is the only originality at their disposal, and God knows they make the most of it! + 

What remains? the Clergy? It is they who handle the heaviest explosives; the ideas of Justice, Truth, Right, and God; and they make this artillery fight for their passions. Their absurd pride, of which they are quite unconscious, causes them to lay claim to the property of God, and to the exclusive right to dispose of it wholesale and retail. + 

It is not so much that they lack sincerity, virtue, or kindness, but they do lack humility; they have none, however much they may profess it. Their practice consists in adoring their navel as they see it reflected in the Talmud, or the Old and New Testaments. They are monsters of pride, not so very far removed from the fool of legend who thought himself God the Father. Is it so much less dangerous to believe oneself His manager, or His secretary? + 

Clerambault was struck by the morbid character of the intellectual species. In the bourgeois caste the power of organisation and expression of ideas has reached almost monstrous proportions. The equilibrium of life is destroyed by a bureaucracy of the mind which thinks itself much superior to the simple worker. Certainly no one can deny that it has its uses; it collects and classifies thoughts in its pigeonholes and puts them to various purposes, but the idea rarely occurs to it to examine its material and renew the content of thought. + 

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 enormously to wickedness and criminality. This sort of intoxication deteriorates the brain, filling it with hallucinations, to which the living are sacrificed. + 

What an extraordinary spectacle, seen from the interior of our skulls! A throng of phantoms rising from our overexcited brains: Justice, Liberty, Right, Country.⁠ ⁠… Our poor brains are all equally honest, but each accuses the other of insincerity. In this fantastic shadowy struggle, we can distinguish nothing but the cries and the convulsions of the human animal, possessed by devils.⁠ ⁠… Below are clouds charged with lightnings, where great fierce birds are fighting; the realists, the men of affairs, swarm and gnaw like fleas in a skin; with open mouths, and grasping hands, secretly exciting the folly by which they profit, but in which they do not share.⁠ ⁠… + 

O Thought! monstrous and splendid flower springing from the humus of our time-honoured instincts!⁠ ⁠… In truth, thou art an element penetrating and impregnating man, but thou dost not spring from him, thy source is beyond him, and thy strength greater than his. Our senses are fairly well-adapted to our needs but our thought is not, it overflows and maddens us. Very, very few among us men can guide themselves on this torrent; the far greater number are swept along, at random, trusting to chance. The tremendous power of thought is not under man’s control; he tries to make it serve him, and his greatest danger is that he believes that it does so; but he is like a child handling explosives; there is no proportion between these colossal engines and the purpose for which his feeble hands employ them. Sometimes they all blow up together.⁠ ⁠… + 

How guard against this danger? Shall we stifle thought, uproot living ideas? That would mean the castration of man’s brain, the loss of his chief stimulus in life; but nevertheless the eau-de-vie of his mind contains a poison which is the more to be dreaded because it is spread broadcast among the masses, in the form of adulterated drugs.⁠ ⁠… Rouse thee, Man, and sober thyself! Look about; shake off ideas. Free thyself from thine own thoughts and learn to govern thy gigantic phantoms which devour themselves in their rage.⁠ ⁠… And begin by taking the capitals from the names of those great goddesses, Country, Liberty, Right. Come down from Olympus into the manger, and come without ornaments, without arms, rich only in your beauty, and our love.⁠ ⁠… I do not know the gods of Justice and Liberty; I only know my brother-man, and his acts, sometimes just, sometimes unjust; and I also know of peoples, all aspiring to real liberty but all deprived of it, and who all, more or less, submit to oppression. + 