OF THE SPIRIT. 397 



the general impression that such arguments were dictated 

 by party interest, by the spirit of reaction which had, 

 during the period of the Restoration, got the upper hand 

 in French literature, and which was at that time opposed 

 alike to the liberal empiricism which prevailed in this 

 country, and to the yet more liberal intellectualism 

 which prevailed in Germany. 

 This explains also, to a large extent, why religious 76. 



Religious ' 



philosophy in France took its own course and has not, philosophy 



, , . . in France. 



till quite recently, contributed much to the international 

 treatment of the subject. What was original in it 

 seemed so much bound up with ecclesiastical polemics, 

 with the interests of the Roman Catholic Church, with 

 the political question of the relation of Church and State, 

 that the free development of philosophical thought in 

 the Protestant countries took little interest in it ; on 

 the other side, the development of free enquiry in 

 matters of belief in France either assimilated in an 

 eclectic spirit the ideas of German transcendentalism, 

 or was occupied under the combined influence of the 

 spirit of exact research and of the sensational-philosophy 

 of the eighteenth century in elaborating that system of 

 Positive Thought through which at a later date France 

 once more entered the arena of European speculation. 

 Thus it comes that the religious philosophy of such 

 thinkers as de Bonald, de Maistre, and de Lamennais 

 has hardly found a place in the history of the subject ^ 



^ A notable exception to this 

 general practice is to be found in 

 tlie second volume of M. Ferraz's 

 ' History of Philosophy in France 

 during the Nineteenth Century ' 



(1880), which deals with "Tradi- 

 tionalism " and '• Ultramontanism." 

 In the Preface the author thinks 

 it necessary to justify the inclusion 

 of these currents of thought in a 



