For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of political
speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic generalities,
trying in vain to make something out of his colorless tirades, and we
grasp nothing.[91] When we, in astonishment, ask ourselves what all
this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he
has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the
same as a sectarian preaching to his congregation, neither the
preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the
dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better if the
container is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank
turns. And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a
contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him
piles of human heads, the same as a text from the gospels means to a
grand inquisitor the burning of heretics. - Through this extreme
perversity, the cuistre spoils his own mental instrument; thenceforth
he employs it as he likes, as his passions dictate, believing that he
serves truth in serving these.
Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity.
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