228 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



resist the seductiveness of the French style and 

 method." ^ Accordingly M. Taine maintains that " the 

 fever of demolition and reconstruction remained super- 

 ficial and momentary in England. Deism, atheism, 

 materialism, scepticism, ideology, theories of the return 

 to nature, proclamation of the rights of men, all the 

 audacities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and 

 Mandeville, all the darings of Hume, Hartley, James 

 Mill, and Bentham, all the revolutionary doctrines 

 remaine'd there, greenhouse plants confined here and 

 there in the isolated cabinets of a few thinkers : in 

 the open air they quickly degenerated after a short 

 blossoming, through the heavy competition of the older 

 vegetation which still occupied the land." ^ 



This older vegetation was the inductive spirit, the 

 healthy common-sense and the constitutional life of the 

 nation which then already " slowly broadened down from 

 precedent to precedent." Locke had something else to 

 do than to work out a system of philosophy by drawing 

 out with slender logic the extreme conclusions of a 

 theory which worked with the two conceptions of sensa- 

 tion and reflection and started with the human soul as a 

 tabula rasa. His writings on questions of government, 

 on toleration, and education, had the object not of up- 

 setting but of reforming the existing political and social 

 conditions. The extreme consequences of his line of 

 reasoning, drawn by Hume, were — when the appeal 

 to common-sense was allowed — easily refuted by Thomas 



' See H. Taine, ' Les Origines de 

 la France Contemporaine ' (L' Ancien 

 RegiQie), 15th ed. 1887, p. 331, &c. 



The above quotation includes a 



passage from Joseph de Maistre 

 referring to French style. 

 2 Taine, loc. cit., p. 330. 



