Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/458

442 more heavy artillery was wheeled into place, in order to make a last desperate defense of the sacred theory. The leaders in this effort were the three great Ultramontanes, De Maistre, De Bonald, and Lammenais. Condillac's contention that "languages were gradually and insensibly acquired, and that every man had his share of the general result," they attacked with reasoning based upon premises laid down in the Book of Genesis. De Maistre especially excels in ridiculing the philosophic or scientific theory. Lammenais, who afterward became so vexatious a thorn in the side of the Church, insisted, at this earlier period, that "man can no more think without words than see without light." And then, by that sort of mystical play upon words so well known in the higher ranges of theologic reasoning, he clinches his argument by saying, "The Word is truly and in every sense 'the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.'"

But even such leaders as these could not stay the progress of thought. While they seemed to be carrying everything before them in France, researches in philology made at such centers of thought as the Sorbonne and the College of France were undert mining the last great fortress. Curious indeed is it to find thathe Sorbonne, the stronghold of theology through so many centuries, was now made in the nineteenth century the arsenal and stronghold of the new ideas. But the most striking result of the new tendency in France was seen when the greatest of the three champions, Lammenais himself, though offered the highest church preferment, and even a cardinal's hat, braved the papal anathema, and went over to the scientific side.

In Germany philological science took so strong a hold that its positions were soon recognized as impregnable. Leaders like the Schlegels, William von Humboldt, and, above all, Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm, gave such additional force to scientific truth that it could no longer be withstood. To say nothing of other conquests, the demonstration of that great law in philology which bears Grimm's name brought home to all thinking men the