Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/95

This was a miracle-working wind. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. This was true even of the greatest. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a Will in the Convention which was that of all, and yet not that of any one person. This Will was an Idea, an idea indomitable and immeasurable, which swept from the summit of heaven into the darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that Idea passed, it beat down one and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam, and dashed that one upon the reefs. This Idea knew whither it was going, and drove the whirlwind before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe the tide to the waves. The Revolution is a word of the unknown. Call it good or bad, according as you yearn towards the future or the past, but leave it to the power which caused it. It seems the joint work of grand events and grand individualities mingled, but it is in reality the result of events. Events dispense, men suffer. Events dispense, men sign – Desmoulins, Danton, Murat, Grégoire, and Robespierre are mere scribes. The great and mysterious writer of these grand pages has a name – God; and a mask Destiny. The Revolution is a form of the eternal phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.

This striking and instructive passage discloses the very heart of the fallacy. In the earlier sentences Hugo comes near to a true explanation of the actual phenomenon – viz. a course of events which seems to transcend individual conscious direction, suggesting the true cause, the operation of a general or collective will, which he not unwisely calls an Idea.