“Because the 18th century was fond of personifying abstractions (‘Corruption has seized the provinces’ etc.) and because Carlyle carried that further and gave us a tinge of poetry in his French Revolution, whence it passed into every writer who wants to write impressively on poetical and historical subjects, we have now reached a stage at which causes, movements, tendencies etc. are talked of as if they were real things who did things: as if it were Bolshevism, not Bolsheviks, who fomented revolutions, and the revolutionary spirit, instead of the revolutionary spirits, which made men drunk.”

Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 704; serial letter written to his brother, dated 9-27 July, 1927.