THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY 



times, from which all our individual intelli- 

 gences, with all their real or fancied enlighten- 

 ment, are both by instruction and by inheritance 

 derived. To refute the mediaeval conception 

 of the world, without accounting for its long 

 predominance, was to leave it but half refuted. 

 And accordingly, when this negative philosophy 

 was brought to a practical test by the Revolu- 

 tion of 1789, its inefficiency, both for construc- 

 tion of the new, and for thorough destruction 

 of the old, was made painfully manifest. It 

 soon became evident that more than one brick 

 of the mediaeval edifice had been left standing, 

 to serve as an obstruction. In France — then 

 the centre of the European intellectual move- 

 ment — there set in a powerful reaction. Against 

 the revolutionary school of negative philoso- 

 phers and anarchical statesmen, there asserted 

 itself a retrograde school, which saw no escape 

 save in a return to the mediaeval conception of 

 the world and a renewal of adherence to mediae- 

 val principles of action. This retrograde move- 

 ment was represented in politics by Napoleon, 

 the latter half of whose career was characterized 

 by the conscious effort to imitate the achieve- 

 ments of Charles the Great ; in literature by 

 Chateaubriand ; in psychology by Laromiguiere 

 and Maine de Biran ; and in general philoso- 

 phy by Joseph de Maistre. The last-named 

 writer, who, for reasons easily explicable, has 



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