Montesquieu, finds that the great historian has too servilely
confined himself to history, and attempts to do the work over again by
organizing society as it should be, instead of studying society as it
is.--Never were such systematic and superficial institutions built up
with such a moderate extract of human nature.[3241] Condillac, employing
sensation, animates a statue, and then, by a process of pure reasoning,
following up its effects, as he supposes, on smell, taste, hearing,
sight and touch, fashions a complete human soul. Rousseau, by means of a
contract, founds political association, and, with this given idea, pulls
down the constitution, government and laws of every balanced social
system. In a book which serves as the philosophical testament of the
century,[3242] Condorcet declares that this method is the "final step of
philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier between humanity
and its ancient infantile errors." "By applying it to morals, politics
and political economy the moral sciences have progressed nearly as much
as the natural sciences. With its help we have been able to discover
the rights of man." As in mathematics, they have been deduced from one
primordial statement only, which statement, similar to a first principle
in mathematics, becomes a fact of daily experience, seen by all and
therefore self-evident.--This school of thought is to endure throughout
the Revolution, the Empire and even into the Restoration,[3243] together
with the tragedy of which it is the sister, with the classic spirit
their common parent, a primordial, sovereign power, as dangerous as it
is useful, as destructive as it is creative, as capable of propagating
error as truth, as astonishing in the rigidity of its code, the
narrow-mindedness of its yoke and in the uniformity of its works as in
the duration of its reign and the universality of its ascendancy.[3244]

*****

NOTES:

[Footnote 3201: Voltaire, "Dict. Phil.," see the articles on Language.
"Of all the languages in Europe the French is most generally used
because it is the best adapted to conversation. Its character is derived
from that of the people who speak it. For more than a hundred and fifty
years past, the French have been the most familiar with (good) society
and the first to avoid all embarrassment. . . It is a better currency
than any other, even if it should lack weight."]

[Footnote 3202: HIST: honnete homme means gentleman. (SR.)]

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