PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND.

Several similar theories have in the past traversed the imagination of men, and similar theories are likely do so again. In all ages and in all countries, it sufficed that man's concept of his own nature changed for, as an indirect consequence, new utopias and discoveries would sprout in the fields of politics and religion.4101—But this does not suffice for the propagation of the new doctrine nor, more important, for theory to be put into practice. Although born in England, the philosophy of the eighteenth century could not develop itself in England; the fever for demolition and reconstruction remained but briefly and superficial there. Deism, atheism, materialism, skepticism, ideology, the theory of the return to nature, the proclamations of the rights of man, all the temerities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal and Mandeville, the bold ideas of Hume, Hartley, James Mill and Bentham, all the revolutionary doctrines, were so many hotbed plants produced here and there, in the isolated studies of a few thinkers: out in the open, after blooming for a while, subject to a vigorous competition with the old vegetation to which the soil belonged, they failed4102.—On the contrary, in France, the seed imported from England, takes root and spreads with extraordinary vigor. After the Regency it is in full bloom4103. Like any species favored by soil and climate, it invades all the fields, appropriating light and air to itself, scarcely allowing in its shade a few puny specimens of a hostile species, a survivor of an antique flora like Rollin, or a specimen of an eccentric flora like Saint-Martin. With large trees and dense thickets, through masses of brushwood and low plants, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert and Buffon, or Duclos, Mably, Condillac, Turgot, Beaumarchais, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, BarthÉlemy and Thomas, such as a crowd of journalists, compilers and conversationalists, or the elite of the philosophical, scientific and literary multitude, it occupies the Academy, the stage, the drawing room and the debate. All the important persons of the century are its offshoots, and among these are some of the grandest ever produced by humanity.—This was possible because the seed had fallen on suitable ground, that is to say, on the soil in the homeland of the classic spirit. In this land of the raison raisonnante4104 it no longer encounters the antagonists who impeded its growth on the other side of the Channel, and it not only immediately acquires vigor of sap but the propagating organ which it required as well.