Note 133 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal (continued 2)
Richard Aldington translation
La Ruine du monde antique, page 76. See also in Les Illusions du progrès (page 259) Sorel’s derisive amusement at a thinker who said that the preponderance of intellectual emotions is the sign of superior societies. We may take up Sainte-Beuve’s famous distinction and say that modern thinkers extol sword-intelligence at the expense of mirror-intelligence. On their own showing it is the former they admire in Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, and Maurras. (See R. Gillouin, Esquisses littéraires et morales, page 52.) Let me observe that contempt for ‘mirror-intelligence’ implies contempt for Aristotle, Spinoza, Bacon, Goethe, and Renan. Nor does it seem to me that M. Paul Valéry is exactly a ‘sword-intelligence’.