THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY 



Those who have most carefully studied the 

 iconoclastic philosophy of Voltaire and the En- 

 cyclopedistes of the eighteenth century will best 

 appreciate the character and extent of the revo- 

 lution in the attitude of philosophy which was 

 effected by this new method of criticism. In 

 the opinion of those metaphysical thinkers, 

 everything old was wrong, and anything new 

 was likely to be right. They classified men, 

 not relatively, as ancients, mediaevals and mod- 

 erns, but absolutely as fools and philosophers ; 

 the philosophers being all who subscribed to 

 the doctrines .of the Encyclopedie, the fools being 

 all those who believed. in miracles or in a per- 

 sonal God. So utterly destitute were they of 

 that historic sense which enables the critic to 

 enter into the spirit of the epoch which he is 

 criticising, that they could not interpret th^ 

 mythology of antiquity and the theologic dog- 

 mas of the mediaeval Church otherwise than as 

 a set of ingenious devices contrived by priests 

 and rulers for the ensnaring and subjugation of 

 mankind. Perhaps nothing can better illustrate 

 the barrenness of their point of view than their 

 undiscriminating admiration for the Emperor 

 Julian, whose memory they exalted because of 

 his attempt to stop the progress of Christianity ; 

 this being the very reason for which that mon- 

 arch is now justly regarded as one of the most 

 blindly retrograde statesmen that ever lived. 

 329 



