In that respect they go by the methods of their time and in the track of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: their outlook on life is the classic view, which, already narrow in the late philosophers, has now become even more narrow and hardened.

The best representatives of the type are Condorcet,[1120] among the Girondins, and Robespierre, among the Montagnards, both mere dogmatists and pure logicians, the latter the most remarkable and with a perfection of intellectual sterility never surpassed .-- Unquestionably, as far as the formulation of durable laws is concerned, i.e.adapting the social machinery to personalities, conditions, and circumstances; their mentality is certainly the most impotent and harmful.

It is organically short-sighted, and by interposing their principles between it and reality, they shut off the horizon.

Beyond their crowd and the club it distinguishes nothing, while in the vagueness and confusion of the distance it erects the hollow idols of its own Utopia .-- But when power is to be seized by assault, and a dictatorship arbitrarily exercised, the mechanical inflexibility of such a mind is useful rather than detrimental.

It is not embarrassed or slowed down, like that of a statesman, by the obligation to make inquiries, to respect precedents, of looking into statistics, of calculating and tracing beforehand in different directions the near and remote consequences of its work as this affects the interests, habits, and passions of diverse classes.