440 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ship of Locke and Hume, that really furthered the 

 general spirit of unbelief. Hume himself said to an 

 assembly of twenty-six encyclopaedists in Paris that 

 he had never met a speculative atheist, to which he 

 received the reply : " Sir, you have twenty-six in this 

 room." What is significant for our present purpose 

 is to note that whilst the French freethinkers, in 

 the latter half of the eighteenth century, discarded 

 as untenable the first of those two supreme commands, 

 they only so much more firmly and seriously upheld the 

 second, some of them were veritable enthusiasts in the 

 cause of humanity. In the age of the Revolution this 

 found characteristic expression in the popular cry for 

 " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," and some more 

 practical, though very partial, recognition in the Articles 

 of the Constitution and the Statutes of the Civil Code. 

 What was not recognised at that time, but has be- 

 come more and more evident in the course of the last 

 one hundred and fifty years, is this, that in maintaining 

 the principle of universal brotherhood as independent 

 of religious piety and not necessarily relying upon 

 the belief in a Divine Euler, not only the first article of 

 Christian morality was cancelled, but the second article 

 was deprived of that sanction and authority through 

 which it rises to the dignity of being, for every member 

 of human society, an obligation and a duty. It may 

 indeed be said that the whole history of purely humani- 

 tarian Ethics ever since has been a search and as it 

 seems to some, a fruitless search for a new sanction, a 

 new authority to take the place of that which had been 



