at harmony of being where all speaks of God in accents so mild
and so persuasive, he only perceives eternal silence."[146]

[146] _Nouvelle Heloise_, V. v.

Yet it is fair to the author of this most eloquent Ignoratio Elenchi, to
notice that he honestly fulfilled the object with which he professed to
set out--namely, to show to both the religious and philosophical
parties that their adversaries were capable of leading upright, useful,
and magnanimous lives. Whether he would have painted the imaginary
Wolmar so favourably if he could have foreseen what kind of book the
real Holbach had in his desk, is perhaps doubtful. For Holbach's
opinions looked more formidable and sombre in the cold deliberateness of
print than they had sounded amid the interruptions of lively discourse.

* * * * *

It is needless to say, to begin with, that the writer has the most
marked of the philosophic defects of the school of the century. Perhaps
we might put it more broadly, and call the disregard of historic opinion
the natural defect of all materialistic speculation from Epicurus
downwards.[147] Like all others of his school, Holbach has no perception
nor sense of the necessity of an explanation how the mental world came
to be what it is, nor how men came to think and believe what they do
think and believe. He gives them what he deems unanswerable reasons for
changing their convictions, but he never dreams of asking himself in
what elements of human character the older convictions had their root,
and from what fitness for the conduct of life they drew the current of
their sap. Yet unless this aspect of things had been well considered,
his unanswerable reasons were sure to fall wide of the mark. Opinions,
as men began to remember, after social movement had thrown the logical
century into discredit, have a history as well as a logic. They are
bound up with a hundred transmitted prepossessions, and they have become
identified with a hundred social customs that are the most dearly
cherished parts of men's lives. Nature had as much to do with the
darkness of yesterday as with the light of to-day; she is as much the
accomplice of superstition as she is the oracle of reason. It was
because they forgot all this that Holbach's school now seem so shallow
and superficial. The whole past was one long working of the mystery of
iniquity. "The sum of the woes of the human race was not diminished--on
the contrary, it wa