religions which are coming to grief. F. Buisson informs us that "no religious doctrines will survive, but only religious emotions, which, far from contradicting either science, art, or morality, will steep them in a feeling of profound harmony with the life of the Universe"[1] This, unless I am unable to see beyond my nose, is the merest balderdash.
"On what will those who come after us live?" This is the great problem posed by Renan and which the middle classes will never be able to solve. If any doubt is possible on this point, the stupidities uttered by the official moralists would show that the decadence is henceforth fatal. Speculations on the harmony of the Universe (even when the Universe is personified) are not the kind of thing which will give men that courage which Renan compared to that of the soldier in the moment of attack. Sublimity is dead in the middle classes, and they are doomed to possess no ethic in the future.[2] The winding-up of the Dreyfus affair, which the Dreyfusards, to the great indignation of Colonel Picquart,[3] knew how to put to such good account, has shown that middle-class sublimity is a Stock Exchange asset. All the intellectual and moral defects of a class tainted with folly showed themselves in that affair.
- ↑ Questions de morale (lectures given by several professors) in the Bibliothèque des sciences sociales, p. 328.
- ↑ I must call attention to the extraordinary prudence shown by Ribot in his Psychologie des sentiments in dealing with the evolution of morality; it might have been expected that, on the analogy of the other sentiments, he would have come to the conclusion that there was an evolution towards a purely intellectual state and to the disappearance of its efficacy ; but has not dared to draw this conclusion for morality as he did for religion.
- ↑ I refer to an article published in the Gazette de Lausanne, April 2, 1906, from which the Libre Parole gave a fairly long extract (cf. Joseph Reinach, op. cit. vol. vi. p. 36). Several months after I had written these lines Picquart was himself the object of exceptionally favourable treatment; he had been conquered by the fatalities of Parisian life, which have ruined stronger men than he.
