Monographies. Personnalités

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE

appearing twenty times a year

PARIS

8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

Our old subscribers know and our new subscribers will see that we engage in no advertising whatsoever in these cahiers. What follows is therefore in no sense advertising.

I take the liberty of insisting that our subscribers clip the coupon on page 249, which entitles them to bring a friend to a performance of the 14th of July. I who never set foot in the theater went there. I am going back. There is a considerable interest, as I shall explain in an upcoming cahier, in supporting most vigorously the effort of the great director that is Gemier.

It is not a matter of organizing a cabal to make a play succeed that seems to want to go on its own.

But it is a matter of our not making Romain Rolland’s popular action bear the penalty of the reprobation that almost all of us have for the theater. This reprobation is amply justified by the majority of the spectacles that have been billed for us for several years.

But it would be unjust for so fine a drama to suffer the backlash of bad plays.

It is not a matter of sending people to the performances. It is a matter of going oneself.

Charles Peguy

We too must prepare ourselves for the coming elections. We ask our subscribers kindly to send us the programs, posters, interesting circulars that may come into their hands. We shall compile dossiers from them. Our subscribers will know how to choose, to inform us without overwhelming us.

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Some of our subscribers have been troubled that I made personalities in the seventh cahier of the third series. One may read in the second cahier of the first series:

When I had gathered all this information about the personal struggle that followed the explosion of the manifesto, I wanted to begin seeking information about the general conversation that soon accompanied this personal struggle, but I realized that I already had almost a full cahier, since I wanted to give a place in this dispatch to the discussion of the law on the labor of children, of minor girls and of women in industrial establishments. I therefore gathered up all my documents and went off to find the citizen doctor, socialist revolutionary moralist internationalist. But I was a little embarrassed by what I was bringing him. For I had in my hands a cahier almost entirely full of personalities. Now I had long since been very pertinently taught to neglect personalities; we must, I had been told, neglect personalities; we are the soldiers of a universal army; we work and we fight for a universal ideal; we prepare the universal social revolution: we have no business considering either specialties, or particularities, or individualities, or even personalities,

twelfth cahier of the third series

but only generalities and universalities: thus did the masters I once had teach me. I presented my scruples to the doctor, for being a moralist he is a casuist: I mean by this that he works in cases of conscience; not that he issues orders and commandments with authority, but he modestly presents consultations, he proposes for the resolution of these cases the solutions that seem to him in conformity with reason.

--- Citizen doctor, I wanted to make a cahier with the documents and the information I would have on the preparation of the national socialist Congress, very recently held in Paris, in a memorable gymnasium. But we cannot master destiny. I had resolved to begin by classifying all the documents and all the personal information; I was cunningly neglecting the documents and information coming from groups and organizations: for while the individual citizens were engaging in the tumultuous and increasingly general conversation whose first principal elements you have in your hands, an immense movement was being born in the distant provinces and in the distant ranks of forgotten soldiers. While the personages continued to address subtle or harsh words to each other, suddenly and slowly the chorus was stirring. This chorus was not composed of Theban elders, but of French citizens, free men who are friends of uprightness. And so the chorus did not let escape sighs, sobs and cowardly words, but it pronounced harsh, free and upright words, audacious and itself astonished to introduce the grossness of its voice into the conversation

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of the chiefs. I therefore thought that there would be in this cahier the swelling voice of the anonymous crowd and people invading the public hearing and for the first time imposing itself upon the conciliabules of the chiefs. I would have placed finally in this cahier, with the conversation of the chiefs and the invasion of the people, all that organic and official work of the organizations, which by Thursday July 20th arrived at that acceptance which allowed the Petite Republique to announce in a robust headline the Estates-General of the Socialist Party. Such were the three parts of which I thought this cahier would be composed. First part: sudden and cautiously violent attack by the principal chiefs upon the principal free men; firm riposte, defense and measured counterattack by the free men against the demonstrators; general intervention of friends and comrades; general and increasingly tangled conversation. Second part: the long and indefinitely patient silent people of simple soldiers and simple citizens has been intimately shaken, stirred to unsuspected depths by the injustice of the manifesto; the people stirs redoubtably; the chorus stirs and from the depths of the provinces and from the depths of Paris begins to make the voice of its resolutions heard; spreading from neighbor to neighbor the redoubtable movement propagates immensely; the chiefs and the demonstrators begin to grow fearful, the free men to soften; the socialist army almost entire imposes silence on the demonstrators, the socialist people imposes silence on the personages. Third part: recording somewhat roughly, expressing somewhat heavily the vast and supple uprising of the deep masses, the nationally constituted organizations, the old organizations themselves enter into conversation, one introducing, the second welcoming, the two and a half following accepting proposals for communication. My three parts would have converged upon that announcement of the Estates-General, where the immediate preparation begins. It was well arranged. What a pity that the personalities of the first part invaded and overflowed my whole cahier!

--- Have no extraordinary remorse, citizen, for having let a whole cahier be invaded by these personalities, for they have committed invasions far more pernicious. These cahiers seem important to you because you work on them, but they have some interest for me only insofar as they present the faithful image of reality. Far then from being scandalized that these personalities have thus invaded a whole cahier for you, as you say a little avariciously, I am happy for you, for this cahier has thus become a more faithful image of reality. Reality itself, citizen, has been dangerously invaded by these personalities. You have expounded to me, a bit verbosely, like an author who has bungled his play, a plan for a cahier in three well-arranged and well-composed parts: these personalities have disrupted plans of action far better composed than you will ever compose your cahiers. You have had to postpone to coming cahiers the end of the first part, the second and the third: these personalities have caused the postponement of actions far more urgent than the publication of your cahiers will ever be.

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--- I did not know, citizen, that my bungled cahier was thus a faithful image of reality. You believe that in letting myself be invaded by personalities I conformed, unintentionally, to the only model I have ever set before myself. But the question I submit to you, because it has given me scruples, is precisely this: Must one always conform to reality? In particular must one conform to reality when it presents us with the personal action of personalities?

--- When the question is thus posed, it seems to me, citizen, that the answer is not in doubt.

--- Nor is that how the question embarrasses me. A young comrade, a citizen of the best informed, said one day in my presence: “We must never make personalities. Even if we were attacked with personalities, we must neglect this means of defense. By fighting ideas and personalities with ideas alone, we give the battle a nobler character, a worthy character: it is better that the social revolution have this character, and while awaiting the social revolution it is better that human life have this character.” Such were approximately his words. Naturally I am composing them to report them to you, but they had, very nearly, the meaning I give you.

--- I hear you. Continue.

--- These words were pronounced before me in a very lively discussion, precisely at the moment of the manifesto. I had intervened in the fray and had not deprived myself of making personalities. I heard these words as a lesson I was receiving. I gave them the greatest consideration, a consideration altogether particular, personal, profound. He who had pronounced them had some authority for pronouncing them, for he had an irreproachable personal situation, unassailable in all respects, and he was thus defending preemptively against himself and his own friends an adversary whose personal situation was perfectly accessible. I admired his moderation, his reserve, his goodness. I seriously wondered if I had not been a boor in making the personalities I had previously made.

--- Continue, citizen.

--- This hypothesis of remorse and this hesitation of method has pursued me relentlessly ever since. I sought to inform myself by considering other men: some, vulgar comedians, declared every other morning that one must not make personalities and spent the rest of their time covertly demolishing the personalities that embarrassed them; others, inconsistent authoritarians, made the same declarations and went off openly into ferocious war against whoever inconvenienced them; the third group, those who resembled that young comrade --- and among these I put Jaures in the first rank --- declared that one must never make personalities and simply conformed their conduct to their word: no matter how much they were personally attacked, no doubt they defended themselves personally, but they never counterattacked personally. When I compared myself to these last --- for indeed how can one give oneself the moral references necessary for conduct if one does not compare oneself? --- it appeared to me that I was ugly in comparison to them;

they were evidently, frankly good. But this observation did not suffice me, for I knew through painful experience that it is not enough for an action to have a beautiful appearance or even a first evidence for it to be moral; often a beautiful action carries with it unperceived, but inseparable, and immoral corollaries or consequences; conversely I had known that there are apparently ugly actions which not only are moral but are rigorously commanded by the moral law. I was therefore unhappy to have appeared boorish, or coarse, or impolite. But I did not know with certainty whether I had been wrong. My trouble has not ceased. I therefore pose the question to you. Is it permitted to make personalities? Must one make personalities?

--- This expression: to make personalities, has two slightly distinct meanings depending on whether we use it in the order of action or in the order of knowledge.

The doctor began thus, without any shame, and above all without false shame; he did not think it pedantic or affected, when treating a subject of philosophy or when looking at actions as a philosopher, even the most familiar ones, to employ the language of philosophy; on the contrary he thought it pedantic and affected to avoid inopportunely the words of one’s trade, just as it is pedantic and affected to employ them inopportunely; he therefore thought that one should speak of induction and deduction when the time comes, just as the carpenter speaks of tenons and mortises.

In the order of knowledge, the doctor continued, making personalities can have only one meaning: attributing to certain personalities a given action. I suppose that a certain event occurs: it will be said that we make personalities if we attribute to a certain personality a certain part in these events.

--- Would you, doctor, choose an example? All these “certain”s somewhat clutter the field of my reasoning.

--- You would do well, citizen, to accustom yourself a little to abstract reasoning: abstract reasoning is often convenient, provided it is faithful, and that one takes care to relate it ultimately to concrete reality.

--- Let us relate, citizen doctor, shall we?

--- The example is ready-made: I observe that the manifesto occurs: it will be said that we make personalities if we attribute to the very personality of Vaillant, Lafargue and Guesde the greater part of this event.

--- But then, citizen doctor, how can one not make personalities?

--- That is what I ask myself in vain, and I come to the point here of no longer even grasping the meaning of the question you have asked me.

--- Yet, citizen doctor, at the moment I asked it, it seemed to me that it did have a meaning. In all public discussions, as soon as someone replies to a speaker: “you are making personalities,” or: “do not make personalities,” the speaker falls silent and apologizes; he will start again the next moment, but on the spot he thinks he must make this concession, show this deference to the common opinion, thus formulated: “One does not make personalities.” Finally in the smallest discussions, always the interlocutor stops at this reproach, as if he had brusquely and inadvertently violated the rule of the game. Since I have been attending public, private, and mixed discussions, I have never heard a single citizen reply to the interrupter: “Perfectly, sir, I am making personalities, because I must make personalities here.” No, always excuses, stammerings, acknowledgments, promises not to start again, kept or not kept, according to characters and occasions. If therefore we conclude that we have the right, and that we have the duty to make personalities, in the order of knowledge, we shall be opposed to the common opinion, to the general opinion of all our comrades and fellow citizens, of the public itself. And we shall not have on our side those who make personalities, who eat personalities, who nourish personalities, for they will never admit it. Often they do not dare admit it to themselves.

--- I prefer not to have those last with me, replied the doctor. But you do not frighten me by declaring that we shall never have anyone with us. Neither do I have the pride of the herd: I resemble here the venerable dean. I am not even terrified at the idea that one could place me under interdict, for it has been a very long time that I have been a heretic: I was a student at the lycee, in the upper school, when I became a heretic, and I am not sure if that was my beginning: the prep students --- that is how we named those of our comrades, more glorious and more courageous than we, who were preparing for the entrance examinations to the Ecole Polytechnique and to the special military school of Saint-Cyr --- wanted to put me in quarantine: I had vigorously revolted against the pretension they had of ruling the senior courtyard, where I had just arrived; I had vigorously revolted against those hazing rituals by which they wanted to demonstrate to us the superiority of seniors over newcomers and of the military over civilians; these superior students of the ruling classes wanted more or less to put me in quarantine, and that, if I were not afraid of using a strong word, to persecute me: it was thus that I came to know the beginnings of antisemitism; I was fortunately defended by a good number of civilians with vigorous fists, who were saving in me the president of a school association of physical exercise and outdoor games; the civilians beat the military, as happens quite often when the soldiers have left their sabers at home; --- I regret having to confess that a fairly large number of those good civilians have also since become antisemites; --- I do not know if that was the first time I was placed under interdict, but assuredly it was not the last; and if ever a General Committee places me under interdict because I shall have made personalities, in the order of knowledge, believe me that this time will not be the last either; I have revolted against all hazing rituals and all canular tricks and all those old institutions by which a certain contingent of collective authoritarians impose or want to impose upon a few free individuals the mark of common superiority; one must not tell me tales about the utility of these institutions for softening characters and sweetening manners; it was in the regiment that I least had to revolt against these hazing rituals; I do not know if I had the

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good fortune of landing in a company or in a battalion or in a regiment better recruited; otherwise I would propose this simple explanation, that regiments are supplied mainly by the people, that the immense majority of my seniors were men of the people, that the true spirit of comradeship is more flourishing among the people, that the spirit of party and the spirit of authority rage less there than in the bourgeoisie; I do not speak of discipline, understood most often as a collective hazing; in my provincial town the conservatives placed me under interdict because I was becoming a republican, the Catholics placed me under interdict because I was becoming a freethinker, the good people placed me under interdict because I was doing politics --- that is what they call action ---; the bourgeois placed me under interdict because I was a socialist; later the antisemites placed me under interdict because I was a Dreyfusard; it may be that the Socialist Party will one day place me under interdict because I am an anarchist; and I do not despair that one day later some anarchist will place me under interdict because I am a bourgeois. It is of no consequence.

--- Doctor, I beg your pardon, but it seems to me that you are speaking here no longer as a doctor, but with a certain bitterness, a certain harshness, if you will. First you have told me your story with a certain breadth and with an incontestable complacency. Then you have, I fear, employed irony, and we must carefully guard against employing irony. Finally I fear that you have the pride of one who is not of the herd.

--- You are approximately right, my friend, on the second point. But you are not right on the first and you are not right on the third: I am far too unhappy to have any pride; I am unhappy that the recently instituted Socialist Party has inaugurated its constitution precisely by taking, with regard to free thought, with regard to justice, with regard to truth, the old authoritarian attitude of ancient cities, of Churches, of modern and bourgeois States; since that time I have been unhinged; I walk about in clogs, in this great cold, in my garden, and I say to myself like a beast: “They have suppressed the freedom of the press! They have suppressed the freedom of the tribune!” --- for the press is the most open tribune, the tribune of those who are not orators, of those who are not deputies, of those who are not delegates, the press is the tribune of all those who cannot mount the tribune. I cannot get over it, I am devastated with disappointment, sick, and it is for this reason that I employ irony, which is unhealthy. It is painful for me to compare the socialist attitude to previous bourgeois attitudes; I did not expect these new beginnings; truly I hoped we would make something new in the history of the world. I do not want to despair yet; I want to believe that this Congress, brusquely promoted sovereign of a party, had its reason obscured by its grandeur, its imagination troubled by its power. We must hope that it will listen to the counsels of a simple wisdom; we shall tell it and we shall tell it again that the sovereign people is sovereign only over what is subject to ordinary human sovereignty; we shall tell it and tell it again

that justice and truth are inaccessible to sovereign hands; and we shall be tedious; and we

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shall be importunate, as the ancient philosophers importuned the tyrants of Syracuse; and all the same no doubt we shall be believed: I mean that the people will accept our propositions as being true; for the people is fundamentally just, so long as it does not listen to the speeches of its courtiers the demagogues. But it may also be that the demagogues are for a time the stronger, and I am not unaware that by dint of having been placed under interdict by everyone one ends up quite alone, and that friendships grow scarce, and that faced with a party convenient to its partisans he who is alone and unhappy always ends up being wrong.

The doctor continued slowly and softly; he looked within himself and spoke sadly; I let him continue; he had abandoned the consultation he had begun for me; I knew by this that I no longer had to do with a doctor, but with a man, and that this man was profoundly unhappy; he had abandoned that mask of habitual assurance with which he protected himself against the sharp gazes of men: I knew by this that I was beginning to enter his friendship; I did nothing to push myself into it, for I had resolved to hold my judgment and my feelings in suspense until the end of my inquiry; I let him go because his discourse gave answers to several questions of my inquiry, because I involuntarily sympathized with his sadness, because the revelation of his sadness did him good.

When we preached, the man continued, the necessity, the beauty, the fitness and the goodness of the social revolution, and the bourgeois mocked us, who would have told us that the official Party of the social revolution would become bourgeoisified in this respect so rapidly? They have suppressed the freedom of the press! They have suppressed the freedom of conscience. When we preached the social revolution, we wanted to universalize individual liberty, all the healthy individual liberties, and in particular the individual liberty to think and to speak as an honest man: quite freshly. We wanted to universalize emancipation, to give above all to all men the means of escaping bourgeois economic crushing; we did not suppose that at the first lineaments of the social revolution, the economic crushing of the party would be added to the economic crushing of the adversaries of the party. Truly they have suppressed the freedom of conscience!

And when we preached the importunate truth, the Dreyfusard truth, and the reactionaries mocked us, who would have told us that the day was so close when the party we love would cut truth in two, would admit on the outside the truth unfavorable to the bourgeois, and reject on the inside the truth unfavorable to a few personalities.

Pronouncing this last word in the course of his confidence, the doctor suddenly woke up, slightly shrugged his shoulders at himself, and continued:

I beg your pardon, citizen, but I no longer know where I am in the consultation you asked of me. Believe me, I must be very unhinged by disappointment to have thus neglected my profession.

--- I had asked you whether you did not have the pride of one who is not of the herd.

--- And I was answering that I do not have that pride; I

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do not believe that the minority is necessarily more right than the majority: that depends on the species; only reason is necessarily right; sometimes it is the majority that is wrong, and sometimes it is the minority, sometimes it is unanimity: the democratic theory of unanimity is no more founded in reason than the aristocratic theory of the minority, of the elite; but it is not less so: they are not at all, either of them; reason remains in a country that these two theories do not reach: they are valid, and can engage the competition, only in the region of interests. We shall therefore formulate this preliminary proposition:

The number of partisans and adversaries is indifferent for or against any proposition submitted to reason.

--- Doctor, it does not seem to me that this proposition is very extraordinary, and we have followed a very long path to arrive at a trivial truth.

--- I hope that our propositions will never be extraordinary, for moral truth is commonly simple. However we shall also admit true propositions that are extraordinary. I agree with you that this proposition is trivial: agree with me that we forget it and that we misapprehend it in the majority of our reasoning, so that it will truly be a great novelty for us to always have in consideration this trivial proposition. No doubt it is human, if not rigorously just, to grant audience to propositions somewhat according to their introducers; but once the audience is granted, the session begun, it is proper to forget entirely the introducers.

My memory is coming back, the doctor continued. You reproached me for having told you my story with complacency. I shall answer you soon. --- I therefore return to the question of personalities, in the order of knowledge.

At the moment you opposed to me the universal consensus, I believed that one must make personalities in this order. It seemed to me that one must make personalities as one does the rest; it is with personalities as with everything else: when their influence is real, one must observe it; when their influence is nil, one must observe that it is nil; when it is weak, one must observe that it is weak; and when it is strong one must observe that it is strong. And when it is always the same thing, one must observe that it is always the same thing. One must not make personalities in the sense that one would invent, that one would imagine personalities that are not real; but one must make the personalities that there are; one must make, if it is permitted to speak thus, the personalities that one must make. Otherwise, how to provide for this vacancy in the full complexity of events?

--- That is precisely what troubled me. My comrade went so far as to say, carried away by his goodness in the heat of the discussion: “Even if I knew that it is for a personal reason that an adversary attacks me, the historian must explain everything by general considerations.” I protested inwardly against these words.

--- You protested with reason. We must explain by general considerations all the events and only those events that had general causes and circumstances; we must explain

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by particular considerations all the events and only those events that had particular causes and circumstances; thus we must explain by individual considerations all events, even public or general ones, that had individual causes and circumstances. We must attribute to history no new value, no artificial dignity, no foreign nobility. History is the image of events. The history of personalities is personal, as the history of generalities is general, as the history of beauties is beautiful, as the history of uglinesses is ugly; the history of indignities is unworthy, the history of infamies is infamous, the history of pettiness is petty. Why put false heels on history? Generalized history, legalized history, ennobled history is thereby falsified. Let us not make universal history, let us not make philosophical history, let us not make moral history, let us not make polite history, let us not make general history, let us not make legal history, let us not make sociological history, let us not make bourgeois or reactionary history, let us not make socialist or revolutionary history; let us be socialist and revolutionary, and let us make exact history, let us make historical history, let us make history. Let us not sociologize history, let us not generalize it, let us not legalize it. Let us be socialists and tell the truth.

I let the doctor abound in verbose expressions, though I had grasped his thought at the first word, which was not new to me, and which, be it said without offending him, was not new at all. But he was evidently much pleased with the manifestation of this rather common thought and I did not have the heart to refuse him this consolation.

--- My poor friend, the doctor continued as he walked me to the door, the real is the great master; and when one does history it is the only master; and when one recounts an event, even one five minutes old, one does history. Truth does not age with the passing generations; but neither does it grow young with or for recent minutes; it must have no regard for age.

And as I approached the door the doctor concluded: And when one fails truth, my friend, one necessarily fails justice: incomplete truth, incomplete justice, that is to say injustice; the part of events, caused by personalities, that we refuse to attribute to these personalities, in order to spare them, we necessarily attribute, to mask the vacancy, to someone or something: and someone and something generally belong to some personality, not more considerable, and worthy of being spared, but humble, and assuredly negligible. It is always the old system of replacement: When we refuse to attribute to the prominent personalities the part they have in events, we transfer this part to the small personalities of forgotten soldiers and of the wretched crowd.

As I arrived at the stone threshold, the doctor added: Let us not have material to generalize as the bourgeois have cannon fodder. You cannot imagine to what injustice, to what unhappiness that could lead us.

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And giving me the revolutionary handshake he concluded by way of formula:

We can and we must, in the order of knowledge, observe all the personalities that reality presents to us.

--- As a general rule our cahiers will not be reprinted. Until we are dead from it, and everything suggests that will not be soon, we shall look at the work to be done and not at the work done. I take the liberty of reproducing today these old conversations because of the first series we have only five complete collections left, because these collections are worth a hundred francs each, because the region of our present subscribers has few subscribers in common with the old region of our rare subscribers to the first series.

One reads in the third cahier of the first series:

--- You ask me whether we can and whether we must make personalities in the order of action. All the reasons that I proposed to you in the order of knowledge seem to me to hold in the order of action. In the full complexity of the real where we act, we shall unjustly attack the wretched personalities of the anonymous crowd if we do not attack the evident personalities that we must attack, and we shall moreover attack the poor personalities that these evident personalities pursue: for the neutral is complicit, let us not forget. If we refuse to observe that the great and small chiefs throw fear and trouble into the soul and heart of forgotten men, we shall falsely suppose, and we shall falsely say, as has been said, that the people is naturally fearful and troubled, that the people is soft, that the people is cowardly. We are so hemmed in by this full, living and painful complexity, that we cannot charitably spare our great adversaries without unjustly crushing our medium and small adversaries, without unjustly sacrificing our friends, great, small and medium. We are cornered. We did not make this reality, or at least we contributed very little to making it; we are about equally little responsible for it; let us have remorse about it if we wish, but let the remorse at least not resolve itself into false delicacies, really unjust and barbarous for many. When we spare the personalities we must attack, for this sole reason that we do not wish to make personalities, as the blows of axe or hatchet, in this strange forest of reality, always fall somewhere, we fell and bruise, instead of the designated trees, undeserving living trees and shrubs. And what have we done, during this campaign now importunate, once indispensable, what have we done, if not personalities? What have we done if we have not personally defended personalities, attacked personalities, defended unjustly persecuted personalities by attacking the personalities that were unjustly persecuting them. And how would we have defended them, as we should, if we had not made personalities. How to save the murdered without seizing the murderer by the collar, assuming he has a collar, which was the case. And it is almost impossible to

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seize someone by the collar without making some personality with respect to him. We made the personality of General Mercier, the personality of General de Boisdeffre, and that of du Paty de Clam, and that of Deniel. Did we make enough personalities? In any case did we not make the personality of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a captain formerly unknown. The personality of the attack implies the personality of the defense, and conversely. And when we still cry today in our processions and our demonstrations: to the penal colony with Mercier, to the penal colony, is that or is that not making a personality. And we owe even General Mercier the equality of criticism and method. The gendarmes are citizens who make personalities. And we played the gendarmes in this whole affair, let us admit it, or rather let us declare it openly: we replaced the gendarmes unjustly prevented from acting. This painful duty, and one outside our habits, we did it. Someone had to: whoever was not against the personality of Mercier was against the personality, then lamentable, of Dreyfus; whoever was not against the personality of Vaillant and of Guesde was against the personality of Jaures and thus against the personality of the same Dreyfus. Besides in those days no one reproached us for making personalities. Maitre Labori was not making too many personalities; Zola had not made too many personalities; you yourself, if it is permitted to introduce you here, were not making too many personalities.

--- You have a good memory: at the moment when the machinations of the scholarques stabbed in the back the free men engaged at the front rank of the battle, I intervened modestly and I denounced the betrayal; for several fortnights I made personalities; I published in the Revue Blanche a series of articles on the Dreyfus affair and the crisis of the Socialist Party; I said what I thought, what we all then thought of several personalities; I went so far as to make personalities against a friendly personality who, in my judgment, had not attacked vigorously enough the dangerous personalities, no doubt above all so as not to make personalities. Everyone then found that I was right.

--- That does not prove that you were right in fact.

--- But neither does it prove that I was wrong to have continued. Everyone in those days found that I was right. I had not then become a pure anarchist, nor a metaphysician, nor an aesthete. Not only was I loudly and vigorously approved, but I would have been encouraged if I had needed encouragement. I asked for none. I was right to attack Guesde and Vaillant thus, I was right to tell them their truths; what I told them was indeed their truths. I cannot imagine how what were then truths have since become errors.

--- This alteration would be admissible only if Guesde and Vaillant had since brought rectifications. But I do not believe they have produced any. It is they on the contrary who have been good enough to pardon their accusers, and their accused: it is they who have pardoned everyone. They have amnestied. They are merciful.

--- What you have answered me on the question of personalities, in the order of action, does not seem to me to

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hold against the consideration of moral elevation, which you have not envisaged: even were it true that we must make personalities, in the order of action, we must act by generalities, it is said, because thus the action is better and nobler, thus the social revolution is better and nobler, and while awaiting the perfection of the social revolution, it is human life and daily action that is morally better and nobler. To personal uglinesses let us not respond by opposing personal uglinesses, let us not practice retaliation, let us not demoralize politics.

--- Those who speak thus confuse several questions and we shall distinguish the answers. We have never thought of practicing any retaliation, in particular any personal retaliation. But we think that one can and one must make personalities as one can and as one must make generalities, as one can and as one must perform all the acts that are permitted and due, within the same limits, with the same regards, by the same means. We have in no way wished to institute an immoral privilege in favor of personalities, but we want personalities to remain subject like generalities to the commandments of the moral law, in particular to the law of truth. Those theories are called aristocratic or better oligarchic that wish to exempt a few personalities from the equality of the moral law. Let us institute no oligarchy at the heart of the socialist city.

We are thus led to ask ourselves the universal question: can we and must we, by a voluntary and artificial operation, prematurely and apparently realize our wishes, give to the human battle an aspect more beautiful that we believe better, instead of leaving it the less beautiful aspect that we know to be truer. This is a question of education: it arises as soon as one wants to raise small children, it arises for the nurturing University, for schoolteachers, for professors, for fathers of families, before arising for men of action. We shall be better situated to treat it when you bring me the documents and information you will have gathered for and against the freedom of education.

If you think that the manifesto was inspired by the personal pride of the scholarques, you were right to write, my friend, what you think, and all those who approved you, if they thought as you did, were right. Whether you were right or wrong on the substance, we shall examine when we study the present organization of the Socialist Party.

Have you noticed, my friend, the ease with which you have quoted yourself?

--- I practiced a trade where I knew several authors: I easily noticed that the author naturally desired to be read; I knew no exception to this regular desire. And it is fitting that it be so: the serious author desires to communicate his work as the serious baker desires to communicate his bread; I call a serious author one who writes only insofar as he truly has something to write. It is not true that the self is hateful. Nothing is hateful at first. The self is no more hateful at first than others, who are also selves. This affectation of not speaking of oneself

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can have two meanings: either it is sincere, unjust toward the self, favorable to others; it is then Christian humility, and I am not Christian; socialist modesty, which is the sense of measure maintained in justly evaluating the relations of the self to others, is distinguished from Christian humility as socialist solidarity is distinguished from Christian charity; or else this affectation, as commonly happens, is not sincere, and we must leave to low-grade performers such trompe-l’oeil. Which amounts to saying that we can and must often choose ourselves as an example, extraordinary if we are extraordinary, common if we are common. I am common and average, I have too long and too much abandoned myself to others, and it is above all through myself that I know what can happen to an average common sincere socialist long beaten by the strong and long taken in by the clever.

--- You will often be beaten by the strong and often taken in by the clever; but the strong do not beat and the clever do not take in ideas. --- I am happy that you have given such a good answer to the observation you had made to me the fortnight before, that I had told you my story a little complacently. And our general law of personalities is thus verified in the particular case where it is we who are the personality. Even then we can and must act toward all the personalities that reality presents to us.

This having been published for two years, in the second and third cahiers of the first series, here is how the seventh cahier of the third series was received:

This cahier caused quite a stir. Many of our subscribers wrote to us or came to see us.

All the anarchists I have seen or read, without any exception --- I see only serious anarchists --- declared that the cahier was too mild. Some added: much too mild.

All the socialists of the people I have seen or read, without any exception, declared that the cahier was too mild. Some added: much too mild.

The scandal began among the university men. The people of Brest were not pleased. The people of Thiers were displeased. A Toulousain, from higher education, an ardent moralist, wrote familiarly to Pages Libres: If Peguy starts making personalities again, to hell with it! The majority of our discontented subscribers opposed the Indo-China dispatch to me. That is how one should work, they said. Challaye, having been unable to reach me at Mardi Gras, immediately upon his return, wrote to me in the same vein. He also thinks I was unjust. Those who were not discontented were worried. M. Rauh was kind enough to affirm that I was defending the Societe Condorcet against a somewhat imaginary danger. Someone to whom I have never done anything, M. Beaulavon, wrote me an insulting letter. Men of letters were almost as frightened as the university men.

For several months many of our subscribers have been kind enough to regret that we have not continued our

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old conversations. Why, they say to me, why do you no longer go to see that socialist revolutionary moralist internationalist doctor, who gave you such fruitful consultations? Why have you never gone back to see that old monarchist conservative doctor, who had so solidly conserved the sense of national and social conservation? That old white-haired doctor did not deserve so prompt an indifference. Why do we not hear your friend Pierre Baudouin the philosopher, who made grand phrases, and your friend who spoke drily, the historian Pierre Deloire. What has become of your cousin the chimney sweep, your tall cousin, of whom we have kept such a fond memory.

I cannot manage everything. While I am occupied with the management and manufacture of these cahiers, I cannot go see the doctors. My friends are occupied with the work of their trades. Pierre Baudouin does philosophy, which is singular for a philosopher, in a time when philosophers would think themselves dishonored if they did not do some politics. Pierre Deloire does history, and that is new for a historian. Both work to feed their wives and children. They have not been dismissed. My cousin was working on making smokeless fires. As long as the winter was so hard, one could not think he would come here to chat.

When the third series is a little cleared away, I shall be happy to go consult the doctors. When the fine weather is uncontested, I shall be happy to bring my two friends together. My cousin will come during the slow season. Until then I shall defend myself alone, and briefly.

I must confess that coming after three weeks at least of illness and fatigue, amid the worries I have, the stir caused among certain university men by the seventh cahier pained me greatly. I am profoundly glad that our subscribers communicate to me so sincerely, so entirely, without reserve, without loss, in all probity, so severely, so instantly, their impressions. But I was profoundly pained that certain of our cahiers had been read so vainly.

I am struck by this: none of our non-university subscribers, none of our non-intellectual subscribers, none of our subscribers of the people, none of our new subscribers complained that we had made personalities.

The people, who put their skin on the line every day in battles where our chiefs do not even expose their comforts, the people understands very well that in redoubtable civic battles one goes in body against body. The people understands, when one fights, that one receives blows and gives them. And real blows, not demonstration blows.

I am struck by this: none of our subscribers of the people complained that we had made personalities. The people, who receives every day all the real blows, the people who endures every day all the real servitudes, upon whom fall every day all the real repressions, who is every day, as I am, threatened in his bread, in his family, in his health, in his life and in his liberty, the people knows by instinct that war is war, and, when one fights, one strikes. The people knows that life

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is serious, and that life is hard. We shall show them, through the persecutions being prepared for us, that the war against demagoguery is the hardest of all wars.

I feel it well, this evening when I am alone. We have against us all the bent habits of all intellectuals, of all professors. When in an eruption of indignation I began the cahiers, I naively hoped that my comrades and friends from the Ecole Normale and the university would form and remain the core of the subscription. For it was only a matter of putting into practice the ideas of these comrades and friends, the ideas they shared with me. It was only a matter of realizing. I had counted without the power of envy. I had counted without intellectual automatism.

I am struck by this: far from the subscription to our cahiers having formed around my friends and comrades, the subscription, regularly, painfully, constantly growing, has come about against them, without them, widens laboriously without them, against them. Not that we do not have many university men, intellectuals, among our subscribers, among our new subscribers. Not that we do not have some Normaliens and former Normaliens among our subscribers. But they are subscribers because they are free men, because they have a free mind, not because they are university men and Normaliens. It is not following their habit that they read us, but contrary to themselves.

Nothing is as dangerous as false culture. And it is unfortunately true that almost all university culture is false culture. The people, before culture, the people who fights against misery and sickness and death, against vice and decline, against ugliness and filth, against servitudes and taxes, the people knows by instinct and by trial that every battle is thankless and hard. When the student begins to receive false culture, he is taught politeness, and that the human battle is a ceremony. At the same time as he is taught to dance, he is taught that one must not stoop to making personalities. The virtues of the salon cause more crimes through more cowardice than all the vices cause through all the weaknesses of common law.

Intellectual automatism has an incredible force. Aged before their time by false culture, automatic minds no longer respond to the perpetual rejuvenation of universal reality. I am struck by this: that it is not, by far, the university men, as such, who read our cahiers best. It is the unaccustomed minds, that is to say fresh ones, the unaccustomable minds, that is to say poets, perpetually fresh, then the university minds laboriously unaccustomed, refreshed, who hear us as we wish.

What grieves me is obviously not that one does not share my opinion. I love all liberty. What saddens me is that our cahiers serve so little, at least with a certain public. The day when someone sends me a serious refutation of the demonstration I have just reproduced, I shall be happy to publish this refutation. My opinions have never had in our cahiers

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an economic hegemony over different or contrary opinions. If therefore one had refuted my demonstration, I would have published and then in turn discussed the refutation. We would have conversed as free men. We would have come to an understanding as free men. But it is not a matter of that at all.

I published in the second and third cahiers of the first series a serious demonstration of personalities. All my comrades and all my friends, even those who were not subscribers to the cahiers, even those who were abandoning me or betraying me, read my demonstration. I am led to wonder if holders of the agregation know how to read. I know several holders of the agregation who know how to read. But they know despite their agregation. Holders of the agregation have read so much in preparation for examinations and competitions, which is not the best way to read, they have crammed so many syllabi, they have prepared so many authors, that their readings do not enter their deep soul, assuming they have a deep soul. We who are confronted with the harsh reality of life, with the harsh reality of action, are thus constrained, even when such is not our primary intention, to classify our ideas, in order to classify our intentions. But in education the most contradictory, the most irreconcilable ideas can juxt-exist. Students are much more accommodating than life. Hence no doubt the perpetual dulling of university men. Those who have remained sharp owe it to their genius and not to their profession. We who are confronted with harsh poverty, we who have to make our monthly budgets, our daily budgets, life takes charge of refreshing our native sharpness. And we do not have for dangerous personalities the indulgent dulling of accustomed university men, of guaranteed professors.

The university profession in this resembles the political profession. In politics too the most irreconcilable ideas can juxt-exist. Like students, voters, provided they are flattered, are much more accommodating than life. It is a reason why deputies hold, without danger to themselves, the most incoherent language. It is a reason why they serve us, on the eve of elections, these immensely enormous babblings. If our acts spoke to reality the language that deputies speak to their voters, we would have our backs broken in less than a legislature.

One obtains this result: I published at the beginning of these cahiers the demonstration that we have had to reproduce today. All my comrades and all my friends read the demonstration. Not one made an objection. I thought they agreed. I thought it was understood. I had not made my demonstration for my personal use. I had long since noted that the prejudice of personalities was one of the most frequent and most dangerous. I observed that this prejudice caused the gravest injury to socialist action. I made my demonstration for universal use.

A few months later, the misfortune of the times, the injustice of men, willed that my previous universal demonstration served me for my personal defense and for the personal defense of our cahiers. Everything then proceeded as if I had not made my demonstration. By a double

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misunderstanding, or by a countersense, or by a double falsity, or by inadvertence, the same friends, the same comrades who want us to act as if there were no personalities, acted as if I had never proposed any demonstration.

The result was not long in coming. All the formulards and all the formulators, all those who formulate to dispense themselves from thinking, all those who amass index cards to dispense themselves from working, all the well-placed and all the established fell upon me. They were kind enough to concert or not concert to stifle the personality Peguy. These great impersonalists busied themselves greatly with my personality. I owed to their solicitude four months of illness, in two installments, two years of fatigue, atrocious pains, financial anxieties not yet exhausted.

When our cahiers little by little recovered a little, I thought that my demonstration had counted. At the beginning of this series new indications made me doubt. Freed of personalities, our cahiers from month to month widened their effort. I was congratulated. But it was not recognized that finally freed of contrary personalities they were going by their own movement toward the proper ends of their own institution. It was not recognized that I had cleared the workshop where I intend to work my whole life. I was complimented as if, repenting of a former attitude, I had adopted a new one.

I adopt no attitude. The worker who works and who thinks about the work he wants to do does not think about his attitude. I would not return to an old and painful polemic if for a month the perpetual censors had not said or written to me uniformly: You are going to make personalities like last year. --- Since one wants to believe or pretend to believe that I have renounced my second series, I wish to make this declaration publicly:

I renounce nothing of my life, nothing but the excess of the confidence granted to comrades who were to abandon me, to friends who were to betray me.

Comrades and mutual friends, having at first more or less accompanied these contrary comrades and enemy friends, have been kind enough to adopt since toward our cahiers a less hostile, or more favorable, or even friendly attitude. I am profoundly grateful to them. But friendships and sympathies returned must not encroach upon friendships and sympathies that remained faithful. We shall not speak of rallying, since we do not make politics. But we cannot abandon to our returned friends the direction and government of our institution. It would be unjust for so small a contingent, a fiftieth at most of our subscribers, to exercise over our cahiers an authority of command that no one ever, neither the unanimity of subscribers, nor the majority of subscribers, nor the authors, nor the manager exercises. It is not enough that this contingent be formed of friends I had before the founding of the cahiers and who have been kind enough to become my friends again since the beginning of this series. Not being Catholic, I do not have as much joy for one subscriber who returns as for a hundred subscribers who remained solid. For the same reasons that I love modesty and not humility, for

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the same reason we prefer continuous solidity to sin, confession, penitence and remission.

Not that the return of a true friend is not very touching to me, but nothing is as precious to me as perfect, modest, and continuous constancy. And to satisfy the constant needs of action, to give answer to the firm demands of reality, we above all need firmness.

I am told with a knowing air, even a sanctimonious air: Be careful, my dear fellow, you are relapsing into the errors of the first and second series. --- I did not think I was a relapsed heretic. --- You are making again today those personalities that you yourself have regretted. If by these condolences and benevolent compassions one wants to force or lead me to condemn my first and second series, to renounce it, to renounce myself at two years’ distance, to disavow myself, I no longer go along, as Beaulavon says. No, I shall not renounce that poor first and second series, begun, continued in poverty, in misery, in fatigue and in cold, in illness, against all demagogueries, against all weaknesses, against all politics, against the whole world. I do not know what we shall do in the twentieth or thirtieth series, but I think I know that it will be easier to do, whatever it may be, than what I did in that harsh year of the beginning. I did not have a hundred firm subscribers. I did not have thirty close friends. I held on. People counted on my death. From week to week. Those who are kind enough to bless me today would not have to bless me if I had let myself be killed in those days.

I am not a penitent. When I say that I regret or that I deplore the personalities I made, I mean that they are regrettable and deplorable in the sense that they caused much pain to everyone, to the personalities targeted, to the entourage, to mutual friends, to my friends, to me, who am, like a fairly large number of people, a person. Which amounts to saying that these personalities were generally painful. I was the first to feel all their bitterness and to know their thanklessness. But I never promised that I would give the duties of pleasantness an unjust privilege over the duties of pain and unpleasantness, over thankless duties. I never promised that these cahiers would be a delightful garden, flowered with ease and beatitude. We are here to work. Born into a thankless and ugly society, it is not surprising that we have thankless and ugly duties. For it is precisely in clearing away the thanklessness and ugliness before us that we run the following risk: that our acts may be tinged with thanklessness and splattered with ugliness. But since when must we flee risks? It is precisely in sweeping the road that the roadmender amasses mud in winter and dust in summer. Does it follow that the roadmender must stay home? Must we leave the road dirty or dusty?

When therefore I say that I deplore the personalities I made, I mean that I would rather not have made them, that I would rather not have had to make them, I mean that it is deplorable that certain persons or certain individuals or the play of events or the harshness of the real compelled me to make these personalities. I complain of having been compelled. I have pity

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for myself. Just enough. Not too much. I would prefer that this had not taken place. But I cannot blame myself in retrospect. I cannot blame myself for having done what I believed due. I would do it again if I had to do it. When I say that I deplore the personalities I made, I mean that I made them without any pleasure, without happiness and without taste, without zeal. But I did not make them without vigor. Above all I hate hypocrisy. To defend oneself, that is to say to fight, that is to say to give blows and to receive them, and at the same time to whine about the lamentable victims that we are and that you are, has always seemed to me a nauseating gesture. To pray, to weep, to moan is equally cowardly. We did not make life and we did not make men. When through the events of life and through injustice we are driven to battle, let us fight without false shame and without false commiseration, without any falsity. Let us reserve for peace and for the functions of peace the qualities that belong to peace. It would be a failure of those very qualities to introduce them into the struggle, after it has become inevitable. To bludgeon the invader, to drive out the oppressor and in the same moment and with the same gesture to weep all the water of one’s eyes over the deplorable victims thus made, to bludgeon with a crucifix, to strangle with a blessing, has always seemed to me an odious act, has always seemed to me of a revolting falsity, which I would call Protestant if so many Catholics and so many Jews, and so many anti-Catholics, had not practiced it, which I would call English. But what nation on earth has not at some point practiced it.

I go further. I claim that peace is valid and that peace is firm only if the preceding war, after it became inevitable, was conducted loyally. Now I know at least two loyalties, and the second is no less indispensable than the first. The first loyalty consists in treating our adversaries and enemies as men, in respecting their moral person, in respecting in our conduct toward them the obligations of the moral law, in keeping, at the height of combat and in all the animosity of the struggle, cleanliness, probity, justice, accuracy, loyalty, in remaining honest, in not lying.

This first loyalty is above all moral. I would call it personal loyalty. I recognize a second loyalty, to which the attention of moralists has been drawn much less. This second loyalty, which is as much mental as moral, consists in treating war itself, after it has become inevitable, as being war and not as being peace. Quite simply it consists in fighting for real, when one fights. It consists in waging war seriously, in its kind, as one must seriously do all work, in its kind. It consists in fighting body to body. It consists in not committing the lie that consists in waging war as if it were peace, a lie of morality, like every lie, a lie also of mentality, like every voluntary error of judgment and attitude. I call it real loyalty.

I claim that peace is firm, in its kind, only if the preceding war has been firm, in its kind. Here bitterness is salutary. And it is the tepidity, the blandness,

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the quietude and the dampness of musty complacencies that is pernicious. Far from bitterness and sourness, as is commonly believed, being two degrees, the supreme degree and the superior degree, of the same kind, the kind of bitterness is what is most contrary to the kind of sourness. Sourness belongs to the family of blague, of gaiety, of the playful, of the pleasant, of the pun and of the precious. Bitterness belongs to the great opposing family of sadness and of joy. Bitterness is healthy and fruitful. Bitter battles leave the field clear for healthy work. Experience confirms this entirely.

I shall not continue the reproduction of the entire cahier here. Our old subscribers will recognize the continuation. What I must say today, to establish the record and to displease no one, is that every time we have tried to work with the League of Education or with the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, these two formidable organizations have opposed to us a force of inertia whose equivalent could be found only in a ministry or in the offices of Public Assistance.

Thus with the subscription, which is in a sense a contribution. I had foolishly imagined that groups subscribed to publications. A friend had communicated to us a long list where he had conscientiously recorded, names and addresses, all the important groups of France and the colonies: groups of Free Thought, Masonic lodges, Sou de la bibliotheque, Circles of education, Popular Universities, Adult courses, Study groups, social or otherwise --- I do not speak of political committees. An experience of two years, which has cost us dearly, allows me to affirm without any reservation that study groups do not study, that reading groups do not read, and that Libraries may well receive pennies, but that they obstinately refuse to receive books. What studies in study groups, what reads in reading groups, are certain persons. And in the groups where our cahiers have held on, it is because there was someone who held them, or a few.

It would seem at first sight that citizens assemble to contribute. On the contrary they assemble to parasitize. When several contributors have founded a group, they do not say: Since we are a certain number, we are going to send you a little more money, to help you live, to work. They say: Since we are a fairly large number, you will not fail to grant us a propaganda subscription. --- And meanwhile two schoolteachers doing their military service send us regularly the amount of their pay.

Thus in all its parts not only has the demonstration I gave two years ago lost nothing, but the experience of these two years reinforces and confirms it. Until I am given a refutation, I ask that the demonstration be considered valid and received.

My demonstration is valid, at least provisionally and until a refutation appears. I ask that I not be made to repeat it every year, pointlessly. Those of our comrades who teach recognized sciences are much more fortunate. Their audience follows them. Their audience holds as established, at least provisionally, what is established. When Perrin gives his course in physical chemistry at the Sorbonne, no one says to him: Excuse me, sir, would you begin by telling us what a test tube is.

I ask that I not be made to repeat. Life is short, and the task is immense. The time we would spend marking time would be stolen from action. Our cahiers are made seriously. They are worth being read seriously too. Our cahiers are continuous, composed. It suffices to line them up on a shelf to perceive their mode. Those of our subscribers who read them regularly know their meaning, their tenor and their rhythm.

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By precursory signs that seem evident to me we can conjecture that our cahiers are going to enter little by little into a broader action; the public of our subscribers grows slowly, but regularly; we shall no doubt soon be at the borders of what is called the general public. Already through the vigorous effort of Gemier, Romain Rolland’s 14th of July has reached the general public of Paris, the bourgeois public, the popular public, the public pure and simple. The new subscriptions we receive are not numerous but they are characteristic. They are forerunners.

We have never sacrificed anything of our institution to our old subscribers. We owe our new subscribers, on the threshold of a broader action, this loyal declaration that we shall sacrifice nothing of our institution to the general public. Although the taste of misery grows more bitter the more one has experienced it, we are resolved to continue. We are resolved always to publish the truth, even if it should be bland, even if it should be thankless, even if it should be onerous, even if it leads us to make personalities. Our cahiers are not made for people of the world. When we publish philosophy, we try to make it philosophy. For the same reason when we deal with contemporary men and events we do not inflict on the truth that alteration that consists in masking real personalities. For it is not a matter of knowing whether we are agreeable. It is a matter of knowing whether we are just.

M. Seignobos said to me quite cordially: Your cahiers would be perfect if there were not the adversary. This is the party argument. This argument is barely worth five lines of refutation. The more I go on, the more I profoundly believe that the adversary is vice and falsehood, whoever lies and whoever is vicious. For M. Seignobos on the contrary and for many men of his generation the adversary is a body, a bloc, labeled with a name, a symbol whose real content they refuse to analyze. We refuse to halt analysis, reason, before this artificial barrier. We refuse to bend the moral law before this political artifice. To say that one must not make personalities because there is the adversary, so long as there is the adversary, is to say that one must lie so long as there is the adversary, and as it is evident by definition that there will be the adversary so long as there is the battle, and reciprocally that there will be the battle so long as there is the adversary, but that immediately after there is no more battle there is no more adversary, and no more adversary, no more battle, this means that so long as one fights, one must lie. We refuse absolutely.

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In the broader public that we are reaching, what will be the part of the university public? Whatever it wishes. We live under the regime of liberty. The university public of the cahiers will freely make its place in the general public of the cahiers.

When I attend regularly on Fridays M. Bergson’s course at the College de France, at a quarter to five, I am struck by this: In the large hall almost full, among the hundred and fifty listeners and more --- always the discredit of metaphysics --- there is a bit of everyone: I see men, old men, ladies, young women, young men, many young men, French, Russians, foreigners, mathematicians, naturalists, I see students of letters, students of sciences, medical students, I see engineers, economists, jurists, laypeople and clergy, I see poets, artists, I see M. Sorel, I see M. Charles Guieysse and M. Maurice Kahn, I see Emile Boivin, who takes notes for someone in the provinces; people come down from the cahiers, from Pages Libres, from Jean-Pierre, from the Journaux pour tous; people come from the Sorbonne and, I think, from the Ecole Normale; I see notorious bourgeois, socialists, anarchists: I see a bit of everything, except university men. One must believe that all the professors of Paris have class at the same hour. Above all I see to my knowledge neither any professor of sociology, nor any professor of philosophy. I would not be surprised if this true philosopher took this event with a little good humor, and said to himself that his excellent colleagues in philosophy will be the last to give loyal audience to the propositions we all know.