. His spirit refused to abdicate before it. He protested in the name of reason and the intellect against that scandalous dereliction of nature, to which were sacrificed thousands of human lives, and three-quarters of a flourishing city. You are astonished? You smile? You may well be astonished; but as for smiling, give me leave to tell you it is out of place. Voltaire’s attitude was that of a worthy descendant of those old Gauls that shot their arrows against the heavens. There, Engineer, you have the hostility the intellect feels against nature, its proud mistrust, its high-hearted insistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, reason-denying power. Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it⁠—to abdicate, that is, inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of involving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hypocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing⁠—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut goût