that she was not purged. Champfort,
107.]

[Footnote 2329: The following is an example of what armed resistance
can accomplish for a man in his own house. "A gentleman of Marseilles,
proscribed and living in his country domicile, has provided himself
with gun, pistols and saber, and never goes out without this armament,
declaring that he will not be taken alive. Nobody dared to execute
the order of arrest. (Anne Plumptree, "A Residence of three years in
France," (1802-1805), II. 115.]

BOOK THIRD. THE SPIRIT AND THE DOCTRINE.

CHAPTER I. SCIENTIFIC ACQUISITION.

The composition of the revolutionary spirit.--Scientific
acquisition its first element.

On seeing a man with a somewhat feeble constitution, but healthy in
appearance and of steady habits, greedily swallow some new kind of
cordial and then suddenly fall to the ground, foam at the mouth, act
deliriously and writhe in convulsions, we at once surmise that this
agreeable beverage contained some dangerous substance; but a delicate
analysis is necessary to detect and decompose the poison. The philosophy
of the eighteenth century contained poison, and of a kind as potent as
it was peculiar; for, not only is it a long historic elaboration,
the final and condensed essence of the tendency of the thought of the
century, but again its two principal ingredients have this peculiarity,
that, separate, they are salutary, and in combination they form a
venomous compound.

I. Scientific Progress.

The accumulation and progress of discoveries in science and
in nature.--They serve as a starting-point for the new
philosophers.

The first is scientific discovery, admirable on all sides, and
beneficent in its nature; it is made up of masses of facts slowly
accumulated and then summarily presented, or in rapid succession. For
the first time in history the sciences expand and affirm each other to
the extent of providing, not, as formerly, under Galileo and Descartes,
constructive fragments, or provisional scaffolding, but a definite and
demonstrated system of the universe, that of Newton.[3101] Around this
capital fact, almost all the discoveries of the century, either as
complementary or as prolongations, range themselves. In pure mathematics
we have the Infinitesimal Calculus discovered simultaneously by Leibnitz
and Newton, mechanics reduced by d'Alembert to a single theorem, and
that superb collection of theories which, elabor