The mind can do a great deal, but it is powerless to remodel our native faculties.  Whether we hate or venerate the democracy, we are its sons and inherit its imperious need of combat.  The obscure and revolutionary nineteenth century is in our blood, and prohibits the inner immobility, the mental quiet, celebrated by the Epicureans of Greece and Rome.  There is agitation in our serenities, as in our submissions.  Catholics or atheists, monarchists or republicans, all the offspring of this age of anguish have the anxious look, the quaking heart, the trembling hands of the great battle of the time.  Even those who try to stand aloof share the common anxiety.  They too are revolutionists like the others, but they oppose human stupidity, and their mute rebellion is called disdain.

It would be interesting to study among contemporary scholars the different forms of this disdain.  Does not the exaggeration of technical beauties, which is a feature of the school of poets ironically called Parnassians, proceed from this sentiment of Odi profanum vulgus?  Did not Gustave Flaubert compose ‘Bouvard et Pechuchet’ under this inspiration?  Would Taine have undertaken his ’Histoire des origines de la France contemporaine’ if he had not been tormented by a longing to understand the democratic tide which was sweeping him away?  But no writer has felt more strongly than M. Renan the antithesis of the superior man and democracy.  One must read and re-read those pages of the ‘Dialogues’ where Theoctiste imagines the victory of a future oligarchy, to appreciate the intensity of passion employed in the examination of these problems.  He conceives that the learned will secure formidable destructive agents, requiring the most delicate calculations and much abstract knowledge.  Then, exulting in their power, the dreamer exclaims:—­“Thus the forces of humanity would some day be held in a few hands, and would be possessed by a league which could rule the existence of the planet and terrorize the whole world.  If those most endowed with reason had ability to destroy the planet, their sovereignty would be established.  The privileged class would reign by absolute terror, since they would have the existence of all in their hands.  They would be almost gods, and then would be realized the theological state dreamed by the poet for primitive humanity:  ‘Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor.’” We must not attach more reality to this tragic fancy than the author intended, but it shows an incurably wounded heart; and proves that the scholar who drew this gloomy picture has no great tenderness for the favorite Utopias of the age.