Note 106 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

‘A truly scientific mind,’ says one of these devotees of fact, ‘feels no need to justify a privilege which appears as an elementary and irreducible datum of the social world.’ (Paul Bourget.) But this same ‘truly scientific’ mind is scandalised at an insurrection against this privilege, which is also an ‘elementary and irreducible datum of the social world’. I shall be told this that insurrection is not a datum of the social world, but of the world of passion where it is most anti-social. And that indeed is the position of this dogmatism: It considers the social independent of the passionate, whether the latter has been made social (by Catholic education), or has been reduced to silence by force (school of Maurras) or by skill (school of Bainville). The strangest part of it all is that those who argue in this way about the social in itself accuse their adversaries of dealing in abstractions.