It lives in a
world of intellectual _assignats_. If you talk to a Frenchman of art, of
language, of religion, of the state, of duty, of the family, you feel in
his way of speaking that his thought remains outside the subject, that
he never penetrates into its substance, its inmost core. He is not
striving to understand it in its essence, but only to say something
plausible about it. On his lips the noblest words become thin and empty;
for example--mind, idea, religion. The French mind is superficial and
yet not comprehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no
penetrating power. Its desire is to enjoy its own resources by the help
of things, but it has none of the respect, the disinterestedness, the
patience, and the self-forgetfulness, which, are indispensable if we
wish to see things as they are. Far from being the philosophic mind, it
is a mere counterfeit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any
problem whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all that is
living, complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its original sin,
presumption its incurable defect, and plausibility its fatal limit.
The French language has no power of expressing truths of birth and
germination; it paints effects, results, the _caput mortuum_, but not
the cause, the motive power, the native force the development of any
phenomenon whatever.
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