France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 7

light of true political science, is
very poor stuff. Undoubtedly it is so. And Quintilian--an accomplished
and ingenious Taine of the first century--would have thought the
Gospels and Epistles, and Augustine and Jerome and Chrysostom, very
poor stuff, compared with the--
Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools Of Academics old and
new, with those Surnamed Peripatetics, and the Sect Epicurean, and the
Stoic severe.
And in some ways, from a literary or logical point of view, the early
Christian writers could ill bear this comparison. But great bodies of
men, in ages of trouble and confusion, have an instinctive feeling for
the fragment of truth which they happen to need at the hour. They have
a spontaneous apprehension of the formula which is at once the
expression of their miseries and the mirror of their hope. The guiding
force in the great changes of the world has not been the formal logic of
the schools or of literature, but the practical logic of social convenience.
Men take as much of a teacher's doctrine as meets their real wants: the
rest they leave. The Jacobins accepted Rousseau's ideas about the
sovereignty of the people, but they seasonably forgot his glorification
of the state of nature and his denunciations of civilisation and progress.
The American revolutionists cheerfully borrowed the doctrine that all
men are born free and equal, but they kept their slaves.
It was for no lack of competition that the ideas of the Social Contract,
of Raynal's History of the two Indies, of the System of Nature, of the

Philosophical Dictionary, made such astounding and triumphant way in
men's minds. There was Montesquieu with a sort of historic method.
There was Turgot, and the school of the economists. There were
seventy thousand of the secular clergy, and sixty thousand of the
regular clergy, ever proclaiming by life or exhortation ideas of peace,
submission, and a kingdom not of this world. Why did men turn their
backs on these and all else, and betake themselves to revolutionary
ideas? How came those ideas to rise up and fill the whole air? The
answer is that, with all their contradiction, shallowness, and danger,
such ideas fitted the crisis. They were seized by virtue of an instinct of
national self-preservation. The evil elements in them worked
themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them saved
France, by firing men with social hope and patriotic faith.
How was it, M. Taine rightly asks, that the philosophy of the eighteenth
century, which was born in England and thence sent its shoots to
France, dried up in the one country, and grew to overshadow the earth
in the other? Because, he answers, the new seed fell upon ground that
was suited to it, the home of the classic spirit, the country of raison
raisonnante. Compare with this merely literary solution the answer
given to the same question by De Tocqueville:--'It was no accident that
the philosophers of the eighteenth century generally conceived notions
so opposed to those which still served as the base of the society of their
time; these ideas had actually been suggested to them by the very sight
of that society, which they had ever before their eyes' (Ancien Régime,
206). This is the exact truth and the whole truth. The greatest enterprise
achieved by the men of letters in the period of intellectual preparation
was the Encyclopædia; and I have elsewhere tried to present what
seemed to be ample evidence that the spirit and aim of that great
undertaking were social, and that its conductors, while delivering their
testimony in favour of the experiential conception of life in all its
aspects, and while reproducing triumphantly the most recent
acquisitions of science, had still the keenest and most direct eye for the
abuses and injustice, the waste and disorder, of the social institutions
around them. The answer, then, which we should venture to give to M.
Taine's question would be much simpler than his. The philosophy of
the eighteenth century fared differently in England and in France,

because its ideas did not fit in with the economic and political
conditions of the one, while, on the contrary, they were actively
warmed and fostered by those of the other. It was not a literary aptitude
in the nation for raison raisonnante, which developed the political
theories of Rousseau, the moral and psychological theories of Diderot,
the anti-ecclesiastical theories of Voltaire and Holbach. It was the
profound disorganisation of institutions that suggested and stimulated
the speculative agitation. 'The nation,' wrote the wise and far-seeing
Turgot, 'has no constitution; it is a society composed of different orders
ill assorted, and of a people whose members have few social bonds
with one another; where consequently scarcely any one is occupied
with anything beyond his private interest exclusively,'