SB. vi.] THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY. 481 



science and the group of philosophic notions to which its 

 discoveries had given rise. According to him, Kant was an 

 ignorant charlatan, Bacon an atheist in hypocritical dis 

 guise, and the so-called Baconian philosophy &quot; a spiritless 

 materialism/ uncertain and unsteady in its expression, frivo 

 lous in tone, and full of fallacies in every assertion. In place 

 of this &quot; spiritless materialism &quot; he would give us the full 

 blown Catholicism of the days of Hildebrand, every subse 

 quent variation from which has, in his opinion, been due, not 

 to disinterested seeking after higher truth, but to a madness of 

 neologism, a diseased craving after new and strange devices. 



In these interesting opinions interesting because they 

 come, not from a peevish and ignorant priest, but from a 

 man of wide culture, worldly wisdom, and undoubted intel 

 lectual power may be seen the violence of the reaction 

 against that negative philosophy which, in its effort to break 

 entirely with the past, had assisted in bringing about the 

 speculative atheism and practical anarchy of 1793. We have 

 now to note that, from the statical point of view which he 

 occupied, De Maistre was perfectly right in regarding modern 

 scientific thought as an enemy to society which must be put 

 down at whatever cost. For as modern science had not yet 

 reached that conception of gradual change which underlies 

 the Doctrine of Evolution, while it had become distinctly 

 conscious of its hostility to the current mythologies, it as 

 sumed the attitude of Atheism with reference to Christian 

 theology and of Jacobinism with reference to the institu 

 tions of Christian society. Now it is perfectly true that 

 the practical outcome of these kindred forms of icono- 

 clasm, could they be allowed to have their way unhindered, 

 would be the dissolution of society and the return to primeval 

 barbarism. For since it is impossible for a given state of 

 Uvilization to be made to order, even by the greatest political 

 genius, or to be produced in any way save by evolution from 

 an antecedent state, it follows that the dissolution of the 



VOL. II. I I 



