Page:History of Freedom.djvu/634

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- ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

discussion. The finer threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The connection bet\veen the Juste 11lz"Iz.eu in politics and eclecticism in philosophy \vas already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler link behveen the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school-of those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the constitutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbé de Genoude, of the Gazette de France, and opposed by Odilon Barrot, insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy. I t is an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true evolution of philosophy, and that when we have eliminated \vhatever has been damaged by contemporary criticism or by subsequent advance, and have assimilated all that has survived through the ages, we shall find in our possession not only a record of gro\vth, but the full-gro\vn fruit itself. This is not the way in which Dr. Flint understands the building up of his department of knowledge. Instead of showing how far France has made a way towards the untrodden crest, he describes the many flowery paths, discovered by the French, which lead elsewhere, and I expect that in coming volumes it \vill appear that Hegel and Buckle, Vi co and Ferrari, are scarcely better guides than Laurent or Littré. Fatalism and retribution, race and nationality, the test of success and of duration, heredity and the reign of the invincible dead, the widening circle, the emancipa- tion of the individual, the gradual triumph of the soul over the body, of mind over matter, reason over ,vill, kno\vledge over ignorance, truth over error, right over might, liberty over authority, the law of progress and perfectibility, the constant intervention of providence, the sovereignty of the developed conscience-neither these nor other alluring theories are accepted as more than -...