But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not mislead
us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit and
tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles which were
most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who had been imbued
with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had taken part in
the Revolution and survived it, were active under the Empire and the
restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their masters, and
commanding influence by the value of their scientific work. M. Picavet's
laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has
helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to
the age of Comte. The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of
Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.]
and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with
many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace,
Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century
thought. "Ideologists" he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now
sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the
methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science
of ideas, was the word invented by de Tracy to distinguish the
investigation of thought in accordance with the methods of Locke and
Condillac from old-fashioned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the
ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori
deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade
philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders
in 1794. The Institut, which had been established by the Convention, was
crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have continued the work
of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The members of
the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of moral and political science, were
so predominantly Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited,
and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members among the other
Classes.] These men had a firm faith in the indefinite progress of
knowledge, general enlightenment, and "social reason."

2.

Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive
in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and
philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended,
and account taken of facts and aspects