At the last stage
of a dying intellectual vegetation, on the last branch of the
eighteenth century, he is the final freak and dried fruit of the
classical spirit.[88] He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of
philosophy but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulae, the
formulae of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning "the people,
nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality," a
ready-made vocabulary,[89] expressions too ample, the meaning of
which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of the
disciple. He never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches
are merely long strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling
fact in them, no distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye
evoking a living image, no personal, special observation, no clear,
frank original impression. It might be said of him that he never saw
anything with his own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that
false conceptions have intervened and fixed themselves between him and
the object;[90] he combines these in logical sequence, and simulates
the absent thought by an affected jargon, and this is all. The other
Jacobins alongside of him likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but
none of them spout and spread out so complacently and lengthily as he.
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