whom you can control—­suppress if necessary—­than these abstractions, these invisible despots, that no one knows now, nor ever has known.  We deal only with the head Eunuchs, the priests of the hidden Crocodile, as Taine calls him, the wire-pulling ministers who speak in the idol’s name.—­Ah! let us tear away the veil and know the creature hidden inside of us.  There is less danger when man shows frankly as a brute than when he drapes himself in a false and sickly idealism.  He does not eliminate his animal instincts, he only deifies and tries to explain them, but as this cannot be done without excessive simplification—­according to the law of the mind which in order to grasp must let go an equal amount—­he disguises and intensifies them in one direction.  Everything that departs from the straight line or that interferes with the strict logic of his mental edifice, he denies; worse he pulls it up by the roots, and commands that it be destroyed in the name of sacred principles.  It therefore follows that he cuts down much of the infinite growth of nature, and allows to stand only the trees of the mind that he chooses—­generally those that flourish in deserts and ruins and which there grow abnormally.  Of such is the crushing predominance of one single tyrannous form of the Family, of Country, and of the narrow morality which serves them.  The poor creature is proud of it all; and it is he who is the victim.

Humanity does not dare to massacre itself from interested motives.  It is not proud of its interests, but it does pride itself on its ideas which are a thousand times more deadly.  Man sees his own superiority in his ideas, and will fight for them; but herein I perceive his folly, for this warlike idealism is a disease peculiar to him, and its effects are similar to those of alcoholism; they add enormously to wickedness and criminality.  This sort of intoxication deteriorates the brain, filling it with hallucinations, to which the living are sacrificed.

What an extraordinary spectacle, seen from the interior of our skulls!  A throng of phantoms rising from our overexcited brains:  Justice, Liberty, Right, Country....  Our poor brains are all equally honest, but each accuses the other of insincerity.  In this fantastic shadowy struggle, we can distinguish nothing but the cries and the convulsions of the human animal, possessed by devils....  Below are clouds charged with lightnings, where great fierce birds are fighting; the realists, the men of affairs, swarm and gnaw like fleas in a skin; with open mouths, and grasping hands, secretly exciting the folly by which they profit, but in which they do not share....