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 time-serving 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.