132 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



had prevailed in the philosophical schools anterior to 

 the Ee volution, the refined hedonism of Helvetius and 

 Holbach, with no feeling of reverence for a higher or a 

 Divine order, nor even a real belief in the dignity of 

 man, did not contain the germs of a new development. 

 On the other side the sentimental belief of Eousseau and 

 his disciples among the leaders of the Eevolution — the 

 doctrine of the natural goodness of man — had been 

 falsified when, in the breaking up of all social restraints, 

 a general warfare set in. The work of the restoration 

 of society was much more important than the thoughtful 

 investigation of tiie deeper ethical questions. Thus a 

 reaction set in which reverted to older and obsolete 

 forms and, alongside of it, a somewhat superficial 

 eclecticism, an importation of foreign theories, many 

 of which were ill adapted to the existing wants.^ The 



counted all save the eldest son of 

 a noble house as commoners. No 

 impassable line parted the gentry 

 from the commercial classes, and 

 these again poBsessed no privileges 

 which could part them from the 

 lower classes of the community. 

 Public opinion,, the general sense 

 of educated Englishmen, had estab- 

 lished itself after a short struggle 

 as the dominant element in English 

 government. But in all the other 

 great states of Europe the wars of 

 religion had left only the name of 

 freedom. Govern nient tended to 

 a pure despotism. Privilege was 

 supreme in religion, in politics, in 

 society. Society itself rested on a 

 rigid division of classes from one 

 another, which refused to the people 

 at large any equal rights of justice 

 or of industry. " (J. II. Green, loc. 

 cit., vol. iv. p. 296.) 



^ We find all through the eigh- 

 teenth century in England and at 



the turn of the centuries in France, 

 the marks of the influence which 

 the progress of the natural sciences 

 and natural philosophy had upon 

 the minds of the foremost thinkers. 

 English thought, however, gradu- 

 ally liberated itself from the re- 

 peated attempts or suggestions to 

 conduct ethical inquiries more geo- 

 metrico vel mathematico and adopted 

 the more fruitful method of the 

 natural sciences which led to the 

 cultivation of psychology. In 

 France, on the other hand, it was 

 exclusively the purely mathemat- 

 ical — called there geometrical — 

 methods which impressed thinkers 

 like Condorcet, Laplace, and, later 

 on, some of the extreme radical 

 socialistic thinkers, and really stood 

 in the way of psychology, of which 

 Maine de Biran was the only genuine 

 representative. Comte later on 

 recognised, in the course of the 

 development of his positive philo- 



