Note 81 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

Curiously enough, these metaphysics of the historic may also be found among the poets. We all know Claudel’s cult of ‘the present minute’ (because it differs from all other minutes in that it is not the extremity of the same quantity of the past); Rimbaud before this said: ‘One must be absolutely modern.’ Moreover, for certain Christians dogma is only valid relative to a time. There again particularism seems to have been started by the Germans: ‘No exposition of morality can be the same for all periods of the Christian Church; each possesses full and complete value for a certain period only.’ (Scheiermacher.) On the Germanism in this desire to see everything in its ‘becoming’, see Parodi, le Problème moral et la Pensée contemporaine, p. 255.