te of this experiment is
matter of ordinary history. We know that the distinctions of
Casuistry, by enabling the priesthood to adjust spiritual control to
all the varieties of human character, did really confer on it an
influence with princes, statesmen, and generals, unheard of in the
ages before the Reformation, and did really contribute largely to that
great reaction which checked and narrowed the first successes of
Protestantism. But beginning in the attempt, not to establish, but to
evade--not to discover a principle, but to escape a postulate--not to
settle the nature of right and wrong, but to determine what was not
wrong of a particular nature,--Casuistry went on with its dexterous
refinements till it ended in so attenuating the moral features of
actions, and so belying the moral instincts of our being, that at
length the conscience of mankind rose suddenly in revolt against it,
and consigned to one common ruin the system and its doctors. The blow,
long pending, was finally struck in the _Provincial Letters_ of
Pascal, and since the appearance of those memorable Papers, no
moralist of the smallest influence or credit has ever avowedly
conducted his speculations in the footsteps of the Casuists. The whole
field of ethical science was thus left at the exclusive command of the
writers who followed Grotius; and it still exhibits in an
extraordinary degree the traces of that entanglement with Roman law
which is sometimes imputed as a fault, and sometimes the highest of
its recommendations, to the Grotian theory. Many inquirers since
Grotius's day have modified his principles, and many, of course, since
the rise of the Critical Philosophy, have quite deserted them; but
even those who have departed most widely from his fundamental
assumptions have inherited much of his method of statement, of his
train of thought, and of his mode of illustration; and these have
little meaning and no point to the person ignorant of Roman jurisprudence.

I have already said that, with the exception of the physical sciences,
there is no walk of knowledge which has been so slightly affected by
Roman law as Metaphysics. The reason is that discussion on
metaphysical subjects has always been conducted in Greek, first in
pure Greek, and afterwards in a dialect of Latin expressly constructed
to give expression to Greek conceptions. The modern languages have
only been fitted to metaphysical inquiries by adopting this Latin
dialect, or by imitat