Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/822

816 being — was it possible that some one thought of a little girl like herself, as of Una, or Rosalind? A little laugh, frightened and faltering, broke from her unawares — and then she blushed crimson and was horrified with herself. Laugh! on such a subject! Her heart began to beat; her head turned round. What could she say to him, what must she do, if it was this that was in Oswald's thoughts?

 

 From The Spectator.

, in his book on "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," brings up the interesting question why speculative philosophy has had a less precise and well-defined effect on the political acts of England than on those of France. The problem is familiar; it has often been discussed; and Mr. Stephen gives a lucid and bright summary of the most potent theoretical opinions which have been taught in each of the two countries rather than any new solution of his own. The problem is also important; for in our day, systems of political philosophy are at least as active in France and England as they were before the Revolution of 1789, and practical men may profitably ask how far those bodies of speculative doctrine are likely to shape the beliefs and collective acts of the future. As a rule, we can find no surer means of forecasting what will be the religious or the political conduct of our grandchildren than by watching the chief currents of speculative thought in our own time. Thus we get at the general ideas which come from all the circumstances of an age; which are diffused like a vapor, so subtle as at first to be invisible, yet so potent as to affect the constitutions of alt; and which, as vapor is condensed into clouds and rain by cold, are gathered by powerful minds into definite shapes and showers of practical ideas. A speculative thinker codifies the general principles which run through the entire mass of loose current thought, and thus points out the grooves in which men's minds are running. The mere lucid and coherent statement of those ideas usually tends to quicken the movement. The best of all prophets, therefore, are those - very metaphysicians whom practical men despise, even when they themselves are unconsciously the slaves of speculative thought. Before the Reformation, it would have been possible to foretell the coming of some great convulsion from the general ideas of the Renaissance; and the drift of the French Revolution was written out beforehand in the philosophical ideas which, after having been put into definite shape by students, were tossed about until they became the commonplaces alike of fashionable drawing-rooms and peasants' huts. The power of that teaching in France is one of the most marvellous facts in the history of human intelligence. The destructive influence of Voltaire's criticism, and the constructive effect of Rousseau's system can be as easily traced as the results of the repeal of the corn laws.

We do not mean that either of those writers was a great centre of original thought. Of Voltaire, at least, it is true that he condensed the thoughts of profounder minds than his own, and the floating general ideas, into the lightest, wittiest, pithiest prose ever written by pen. But he was none the less one of the most powerful intellectual agents ever seen. He cut down as with a scythe such feelings of reverence as still lingered among the active minds of France, and he left a blank space for the teaching of Rousseau. Thus he helped to make the "Contrat Social" the Bible of the French people. Fine ladies chattered about the compact between the rulers and the ruled as glibly as if, in the national archives, they had seen the document written, stamped, signed, and attested by witnesses. Peasants quoted its phrases in those statements of grievances which foreshadowed the tremendous sweep and force of the Revolution. Men of letters followed Rousseau in spinning Rights of Man and Constitutions out of their own heads. It became the fashion to speak as if the infinitely complex relations of human society could be brought within the compass of as definite rules as the facts of chemistry. To men like the Abbé Sieyès, France was a mere laboratory, in which certain objects could be as easily produced by the employment of certain causes as water could be drawn from the composition of certain gases. He could give a series of recipes for the preparation of liberty, equality, fraternity, for the administration of justice, for all that can bring political welfare to a people. And he was only the chief pedant in the first National Assembly. Nothing showed the immense influence of Rousseau more vividly than the famous debates on the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." Englishmen would have allowed such a 