Yes, he knew it well enough; there was no other choice in the field of action, where all is determined in advance.  Just as the unjust victory leads inevitably to the revenge which in its turn will be unjust, so capitalistic oppression will provoke the proletarian revolution, which will follow the bad example and oppress, when it has the power—­an endless chain.  Here is a stern Greek justice which the mind can accept and even honour as the rule of the universe.  But the heart cannot submit, cannot accept it.  Its mission is to break the law of universal warfare.  Can it ever come to pass?  Who can tell!  But in any case it is clear that the hopes and wishes of the heart are outside the order of nature; her mission is rather above nature, and in its essence religious.

Clerambault, who was filled with this spirit, did not as yet dare to avow it; or at least he did not venture to use the word “religious,” that word which the religions, that have so little of its spirit, have discredited in the eyes of today.

If Clerambault himself could not see clearly into his own thought, it was hardly to be expected that his young friends should do so, and even if they had seen, they would never have understood.  They could not bear the idea that a man who condemned the present state of things as bad and destructive, should hesitate at the most energetic methods for its suppression.  They were not wrong from their point of view, which was that of immediate action, but the field of the mind is greater, its battles cover a wider space; it does not waste its energies in bloody skirmishes.  Even admitting the methods advocated by his friends, Clerambault could not accept their axiom, that “the end justifies the means.”  For, on the contrary, he believed that the means are even more important to real progress than the end ... what end?  Will there ever be such a thing?

This idea was irritating and confusing to these young minds; it served to increase a dangerous hostility, which had arisen in the last five years among the working class, against the intellectuals.  No doubt the latter had richly deserved it; how far away seemed the time when men of thought marched at the head of revolutions!  Whereas now they were one with the forces of reaction.  Even the limited number of those who had kept aloof, while blaming the mistakes of the ring, were, like Clerambault, unable to give up their individualism, which had saved them once, but now held them prisoners, outside the new movement of the masses.  This conclusion once reached by the revolutionists, it was but one step to a declaration that the intellectuals must fall, and not a very long step.  The pride of the working class already showed itself in articles and speeches, while waiting for the moment when, as in Russia, it could pass to action; and it demanded that the intellectuals should submit servilely to the proletarian leaders.  It was even remarkable how some of the intellectuals were among the most eager in demanding this lowering of the position of their group.  One would have thought that they did not wish it to be supposed that they belonged to it.  Perhaps they had forgotten that they did.