They bear the stamp of genuineness, of truth, of a classic simplicity. Their boldness in overcoming the world is free from romanticism, from any attempt to deny man’s weakness or his bondage to earthly things, from any contempt for the dangers to which our fallen nature is exposed. It is entirely lacking in the artifices of embellishment or the rhetoric of fictitious importance in interpreting human things. Their lives are pervaded by a holy sobriety, which is as distinct from the vulgar sobriety of the so-called realists as it is from romantic illusionism.

Vulgar sobriety is blind to values and to the supernatural

Vulgar sobriety or common sense represents rather something negative. The people we so describe are such as refuse, either explicitly or at least by their concrete behavior, to recognize the reality of value and of the spiritual universe.

The first species—that of the ideological deniers of the power of values—includes all those who profess a distrust of all higher and sublime things, and would allow for the reality of nothing except the palpable and the trivial. Although they might not deny the existence of a spiritual world, they would by no means rely upon that world. They consider all men who do as victims of illusions. They are prone to attribute all actions and feelings of their fellow men to low and prosaic motives.

Behaving, for their part, on more or less consistently utilitarian grounds, they pride themselves on being realists and flaunt their superiority above the idealists, who draw from them a smile of pitying condescension. Even more do they distrust the world of the supernatural. What they can touch and grasp with their hands appears to them the only solid reality.

Obviously, sobriety in this sense is a defect, since it springs from the failure to grasp what is ultimate reality: the supernatural, and all the hierarchy of the universe. Such people are wrong in believing themselves realists; for they take their departure from a distorted and impoverished vision of reality: certainly they are not illusionists who mistake phantoms for realities.

They are, however, as far from the truth as are the illusionists—inasmuch as they are blind to a large section of reality, and the most important section at that—clinging invariably to their earthbound speculation in considering everything à la baisse, in the direction downward. They are always disposed to believe that that which ranks lower in reality is more sound and certain.

Exclusively “practical” men are sober in a negative sense