ever party they might have belonged. "We reverence the past," he said. "Not in vain have blazed the hearths of all the generations of mankind—but it is we who are advancing, who are fighting for a new ideal, it is we who are the true inheritors of the hearth of our ancestors. We have taken the flame thereof, you have preserved only the ashes." (January 1909.) In his Introduction to l'Histoire socialiste de la Révolution, in which he attempts to reconcile Plutarch, Michelet, and Karl Marx, he writes: "We hail with equal respect all men of heroic will. History, even when conceived as a study of economic forms, will never dispense with individual valour and nobility. The moral level of society to-morrow will be determined by the standard of morality of conscience to-day. So that, to offer the examples of all the heroic fighters who for the past century have been inspired by an ideal and held death in sublime contempt, is to do revolutionary work." In everything he touches he achieves a generous synthesis of life; he imposes his grand panoramic conception of the universe, the sense of the manifold and moving unity of all things. This admirable equilibrium of countless elements presupposes in the man who achieves it magnificent health of body and of mind, a mastery of his whole being.
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