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This new vision of man that the narrator acquires is also accompanied by a re-vision of his previous view.

`` I thought I knew more than my education had taught me, '' notes the narrator, `` because I had encountered the militant mobs of a political or religious faith ''.

Is this not Malraux himself alluding to his own earlier infatuation with the ideological??

But now he knows `` that an intellectual is not only a man to whom books are necessary, he is any man whose reasoning, however elementary it may be, affects and directs his life ''.

From this point of view the `` militant mobs '' of the past, stirred into action by one ideology or another, were all composed of `` intellectuals '' -- and this is not the level on which the essence of mankind can be discovered.

The men around him, observes the narrator, `` have been living from day to day for thousands of years ''.

The human is deeper than a mass ideology, certainly deeper than the isolated individual ; ;

and the narrator recalls the words of his father, Vincent Berger: `` It is not by any amount of scratching at the individual that one finally comes down to mankind ''.