In former days it was the object that was sometimes questioned, including the object that can be found within ourselves—an “object” being anything of which the subject can be distinctively and separatively conscious, even if it be a moral defect in the subject—but in our days there is no fear of the contradiction inherent in questioning the subject, the knower, in its intrinsic and irreplaceable aspect; intelligence as such is called in question, it is even “examined”, without wondering “who” examines it—is there not talk about producing a more perfect man?—and without seeing that philosophic doubt is itself included in that same devaluation, that it falls if intelligence falls, and that at the same stroke all science and all philosophy collapse.

For if our intelligence is by definition ineffectual, if we are irresponsible beings or lumps of earth, there is no sense in philosophizing. What we are being pressed to admit is that our spirit is relative in its very essence, that this essence comprises no stable standards of measurement—as if the sufficient reason of the human intellect were not precisely that it should comprise some such standards ! — and that consequently the ideas of truth and falsehood are intrinsically relative, and so always floating; and because certain consequences of accumulated errors fall foul of our innate standards and are unmasked and stigmatized by them, we are told that it is a question of habit and that we must change our nature, that is to say, that we must create a new intelligence that finds beautiful what is ugly and accepts as true what is false.

The devil is essentially incapable of recognising that he is wrong, unless an admission to that effect is in his interest; so it is error become habitual that must be right at all costs, even at the cost of our intelligence and, in the last analysis, of our existence; as for the nature of things and our faculty of equating ourselves thereto, ideas of that sort are all “prejudice”.