The enormous influence of grammarians in imperial Rome, and afterwards during the epoch of decadence, as well as in the middle ages, explains also the persistence of the modern fetichism for grammar, which seems absurd in an age of naturalists and mathematicians.
And from thence comes the not less absurd and yet unshakable faith in classicism, rooted deeply even in men worthy of respect, who cause us to lose the best years of life in stammering in an almost useless tongue.
Misoneism in politics.—The same may be said with much more fitness of many social and political institutions which are thought to be modern and which are only relics of other times; it is for this reason only that they attract the admiration and the respect of the majority of people, constituting true conventional lies, as Nordau calls them, but which have their bourgeois believers and apostles.
In fact, the past is so incorporated in our inward being that even the most refractory of us feel a powerful attraction towards it. Thus we may be as unbelieving as can be wished, and yet at every hour of the day we feel ourselves struck and attracted by the cajoleries of priests. We may be lovers of equality, but, as we have already said, we feel a secret veneration for the heirs of our barons. It is in vain that the uselessness of certain laws is accepted; he who upholds and defends them will meet with the approbation of multitudes, called forth by the sole circumstance that the laws have existed. And if civilisation progresses often, it is because it finds in the changes of climate, of race, or in the appearance of men of genius or madmen, circumstances which end in combining a great many small movements in such a manner as to make of them in time a great one. Max Nordau thinks (with some exaggeration) that progress is due more to a few enlightened despots than to all revolutionists. But this progress was very slow; he who wished to precipitate it, contravened the physiological nature of man; consequently a revolution which is not an evolution, is pathological and criminal.
Misoneism in the punishment of crimes against custom.—This is why in primitive legislation we see offences against custom constitute the maximum of delict, of immorality.
II. PHILONEISM.
This theory of misoneism, previously expounded in my "Delitto Politico," has aroused opposition from all sides; especially in France, on the part of Brunetière, Proal, Tarde, Joly, and Merlino. "Children," say they, "women, savages are curious, lovers of novelties, and misoneists are so far from being ignorant that you yourself refer to them as being among the academicians, (these last are still it appears in the Latin world admirers of good faith); artists have success only in attempting new paths; all peoples have the love of change; they prove it by their emigrations and by their invasions; the great invasions of the barbarians were an example of it."
"Besides, if there are misoneists, there are also neophiles, and the one makes up for the other."
"In each of us," writes Tarde, "by the side of habit, a sort of physiological misoneism, exists caprice; by the side of the inclination to repeat, the inclination to innovate. The first of these two necessities is fundamental, but the second is the essential, the raison d'être of the others."[73]
[73] Revue Philosophique, October, 1890.