France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 5

was sure to reflect, and does reflect, this universal rejection of the
restraints of the past age when the classic spirit had been supreme.
Apart from this kind of objection to its exact expression, let us look at
the substance of M. Taine's dictum. 'It was the classic spirit, which,
when applied to the scientific acquisitions of the time, produced the
philosophy of the century and the doctrines of the Revolution.' Even if
we substitute geometric or deductive spirit for classic spirit, the
proposition remains nearly as unsatisfactory. What were the doctrines
of the Revolution? The sovereignty of the people, rights of man, liberty,
equality, fraternity, progress and perfectibility of the species--these
were the main articles of the new creed. M. Taine, like too many
French writers, writes as if these ideas had never been heard of before
'89. Yet the most important and decisive of them were at least as old as
the Reformation, were not peculiarly French in any sense, and were no
more the special products of the classic spirit mixing with scientific
acquisitions than they were the products of Manicheanism. It is
extraordinary that a writer who attributes so much importance to
Rousseau, and who gives us so ample an account of his political ideas,
should not have traced these ideas to their source, nor even told us that
they had a source wholly outside of France. Rousseau was a Protestant;
he was a native of the very capital and mother city of Protestantism,
militant and democratic; and he was penetrated to his heart's core by
the political ideas which had arisen in Europe at the Reformation.

There is not a single principle in the Social Contract which may not be
found either in Hobbes, or in Locke, or in Althusen, any more than
there is a single proposition of his deism which was not in the air of
Geneva when he wrote his Savoyard Vicar. If this be the case, what
becomes of the position that the revolutionary philosophy was worked
out by the raison raisonnante, which is the special faculty of a country
saturated with the classic spirit? If we must have a formula, it would be
nearer the truth to say that the doctrines of the Revolution were the
product, not of the classic spirit applied to scientific acquisitions, but,
first, of the democratic ideas of the Protestant Reformation, and then of
the fictions of the lawyers, both of them allied with certain urgent
social and political necessities.
So much, then, for the political side of the 'philosophy of the century,'
if we are to use this too comprehensive expression for all the products
of a very complex and many-sided outburst of speculative energy.
Apart from its political side, we find M. Taine's formula no less
unsatisfactory for its other phases. He seems to us not to go back nearly
far enough in his search for the intellectual origins, any more than for
the political origins, of his contemporary France. He has taken no
account of the progress of the spirit of Scepticism from Montaigne's
time, nor of the decisive influence of Montaigne on the revolutionary
thinkers. Yet the extraordinary excitement aroused in France by Bayle's
Dictionary was a proof of the extent to which the sceptical spirit had
spread before the Encyclopædists were born. The great influence of
Fontenelle was wholly in the same sceptical direction. There was a
strong sceptical element in French Materialism, even when materialism
was fully developed and seemed most dogmatic.[2] Indeed, it may
sometimes occur to the student of such a man as Diderot to wonder
how far materialism in France was only seized upon as a means of
making scepticism both serious and philosophic. For its turn for
scepticism is at least as much a distinction of the French intelligence as
its turn for classicism. And, once more, if we must have a formula, it
would be best to say that the philosophy of the century was the product,
first of scepticism applied to old beliefs which were no longer easily
tenable, and then of scepticism, extended to old institutions that were
no longer practically habitable.

[2] See Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus, i. 298.
And this brings us to the cardinal reason for demurring to M. Taine's
neatly rounded proposition. His appreciation of the speculative
precursors of the Revolution seems to us to miss the decisive truth
about them. He falls precisely into those errors of the raison
raisonnante, about which, in his description of the intellectual
preparation of the great overthrow, he has said so many just and acute
things. Nothing can be more really admirable than M. Taine's criticism
upon Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, as great masters of
language (pp. 339-361). All this is marked by an amplitude of handling,
a variety of approach, a subtlety