Their intellectual defects are patent.No one can deny that their inductions were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition only half believed, or pretended to be believed.No one can deny that their theories were too general and abstract; but then they were theories as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."Theories--principles--by them if men do not live, by them men are, at least, stirred into life, at the sight of something more noble than themselves.Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as that which Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.
For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical considerations, not by self-interest, not by compromises; but by theories and principles, and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural, and literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they be according to reason or not, are so little according to logic--that is, to speakable reason--that they cannot be put into speech.Men act, whether singly or in masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite incompetent, often quite irrelevant;but which they have caught from each other, as they catch fever or small-pox; as unconsciously, and yet as practically and potently;just as the nineteenth century has caught from the philosophers of the eighteenth most practical rules of conduct, without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.
And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it has learnt, and that a most practical one--to appeal in all cases, as much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature."That, at least, the philosophers tried to do.Often they failed.
Their conceptions of reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to unreason and to laws which were not those of nature."The fixed idea of them all was," says M.de Tocqueville, "to substitute ****** and elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their time." They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their method.They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which concern a stone or a fungus.They mistook for merely complicated traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own.
But who shall say that their method was not correct? That it was not the only method? They appealed to reason.Would you have had them appeal to unreason? They appealed to natural law.Would you have had them appeal to unnatural law?--law according to which God did not make this world? Alas! that had been done too often already.Solomon saw it done in his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end.Rabelais saw it done in his time;and wrote his chapters on the "Children of Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation, which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he was sensual and, I fear, cowardly enough to hide his light, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests; and his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations which followed him, and thought they understood him.
But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if man cannot find truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?
And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the coadjutors of science.
We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics.But we must recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did.They recalled men to facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw--What are the facts of the case? Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.
Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more or less from that evil spirit which the old Romans called "Fama;" from her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and the cruellest of monsters.
From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals, superstitions, public opinions--whether from the ancient public opinion that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that those who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity, and therefore worthy of death--from all these blasts of Fame's lying trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and generally virtuous men, who, as students of physical science, devoted their lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of nature--What are the facts of the case?
It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause and effect, that during the century of philosopher sound physical science throve, as she had never thriven before; that in zoology and botany, chemistry and medicine, geology and astronomy, man after man, both of the middle and the noble classes, laid down on more and more sound, because more and more extended foundations, that physical science which will endure as an everlasting heritage to mankind; endure, even though a second Byzantine period should reduce it to a timid and traditional pedantry, or a second irruption of barbarians sweep it away for awhile, to revive again (as classic philosophy revived in the fifteenth century) among new and more energetic races; when the kingdom of God shall have been taken away from us, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.