«aO COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. iil 



average liuman intelligence of past times, from which all 

 our individual intelligences, with all their real or fancied 

 enlightenment, 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 Eevolution 

 of 1789, its inefficiency, both for construction 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 movement — there set in a powerful reaction. 

 Against the revolutionary school of negative philosophers 

 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 

 mediaeval principles of action. This retrograde movement was 

 represented in politics by Napoleon, the latter half of whose 

 career was characterized by the conscious effort to imitate 

 the achievements of Charles the Great ; in literature by 

 Chateaubriand ; in psychology by Laromiguiere and Maine 

 de Biran ; and in general philosophy by Joseph de Maistre. 

 The last-named writer, who, for reasons easily explicable, 

 has been too little studied, and whose true position in the 

 history of thought Comte was the first to perceive and point 

 out, will perhaps be remembered by future generations as 

 the last heroic champion of a lost cause. Like Don Diego 

 Garcia, whom Cervantes has immortalized, this unterrified 

 knight took it upon himself to defend single-handed the 

 fastnesses of mediaeval theology agaiast the whole invading 

 army of modern scientific conceptions. With that uncom- 

 promising fanaticism which characterizes men who abandon 

 critical reflection in order to constitute themselves the advo- 

 cates of a cause, De Maistre undertook to annihilate physicaJ 



