blow to the family, to individual responsibility and
enterprise and to effective local government. (SR.).]

CHAPTER III. COMBINATION OF THE TWO ELEMENTS.

I. Birth Of A Doctrine, A Revelation.

The doctrine, its pretensions, and its character.--A new
authority for Reason in the regulation of human affairs.--
Government thus far traditional.

OUT of the scientific acquisitions thus set forth, elaborated by
the spirit we have just described, is born a doctrine, seemingly a
revelation, and which, under this title, was to claim the government of
human affairs. On the approach of 1789 it is generally admitted that
man is living in "a century of light," in "the age of Reason;" that,
previously, the human species was in its infancy and that now it has
attained to its "majority." Truth, finally, is made manifest and, for
the first time, its reign on earth is apparent. The right is supreme
because it is truth itself. It must direct all things because through
its nature it is universal. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, in
these two articles of faith, resembles a religion, the Puritanism of the
seventeenth century, and Islam in the seventh century. We see the same
outburst of faith, hope and enthusiasm, the same spirit of propaganda
and of dominion, the same rigidity and intolerance, the same ambition to
recast man and to remodel human life according to a preconceived type.
The new doctrine is also to have its scholars, its dogmas, its popular
catechism, its fanatics, its inquisitors and its martyrs. It is to speak
as loudly as those preceding it, as a legitimate authority to which
dictatorship belongs by right of birth, and against which rebellion is
criminal or insane. It differs, however, from the preceding religions
in this respect, that instead of imposing itself in the name of God, it
imposes itself in the name of Reason.

The authority, indeed, was a new one. Up to this time, in the control
of human actions and opinions, Reason had played but a small and
subordinate part. Both the motive and its direction were obtained
elsewhere; faith and obedience were an inheritance; a man was
a Christian and a subject because he was born Christian and
subject.--Surrounding the nascent philosophy and the Reason which
enters upon its great investigation, is a system of recognized laws, an
established power, a reigning religion; all the stones of this structure
hold together and each story is suppo