ading to capital truths. The
comprehension and application of these truths demand no preparatory
study or profound reflection; Reason is enough, and even common sense.
Prejudice and selfishness alone might impair the testimony; but never
will testimony be wanting in a sound brain and in an upright heart.
Explain the rights of man to a laborer or to a peasant and at once he
becomes an able politician; teach children the citizen's catechism and,
on leaving school, they comprehend duties and rights as well as the four
fundamental principles.--Thereupon hope spreads her wings to the fullest
extent, all obstacles seem removed. It is admitted that, of itself, and
through its own force, the theory engenders its own application, and
that it suffices for men to decree or accept the social compact to
acquire suddenly by this act the capacity for comprehending it and the
disposition to carry it out.

What a wonderful confidence, at first inexplicable, which assume with
regard to man an idea which we no longer hold. Man, indeed, was regarded
as essentially good and reasonable.--Rational, that is to say, capable
of assenting to a plain obvious principle, of following an ulterior
chain of argument, of understanding and accepting the final conclusion,
of extracting for himself, on the occasion calling for it, the varied
consequences to which it leads: such is the ordinary man in the eyes of
the writers of the day; they judged him by themselves. To them the human
intellect is their own, the classic intellect. For a hundred and fifty
years it ruled in literature, in philosophy, in science, in education,
in conversation, by virtue of tradition, of usage and of good taste.
No other was tolerated and no other was imagined; and if, within this
closed circle, a stranger succeeds in introducing himself, it is on
condition of adopting the oratorical idiom which the raison raisonnante
imposes on all its guests, on Greeks, Englishmen, barbarians, peasants
and savages, however different from each other and however different
they may be amongst themselves. In Buffon, the first man, on narrating
the first hours of his being, analyses his sensations, emotions and
impulses, with as much subtlety as Condillac himself. With Diderot, Otou
the Tahitian, with Bernardin de St. Pierre, a semi-savage Hindu and
an old colonist of the Ile-de-France, with Rousseau a country vicar,
a gardener and a juggler, are all accomplished conversationalists
and moralists.