In Marmontel and in Florian, in all the literature of
inferior rank preceding or accompanying the Revolution, also in the
tragic or comic drama, the chief talent of the personage, whoever he may
be, whether an uncultivated rustic, tattooed barbarian or naked savage,
consists in being able to explain himself, in arguing and in following
an abstract discourse with intelligence and attention, in tracing for
himself, or in the footsteps of a guide, the rectilinear pathway of
general ideas. Thus, to the spectators of the eighteenth century, Reason
is everywhere and she stands alone in the world. A form of intellect so
universal necessarily strikes them as natural, they resemble people
who, speaking but one language, and one they have always spoken with
facility, cannot imagine another language being spoken, or that they may
be surrounded by the deaf and the dumb. And so much the more in as much
as their theory authorizes this prejudice. According to the new ideology
all minds are within reach of all truths. If the mind does not
grasp them the fault is ours in not being properly prepared; it will
comprehend if we take the trouble to guide it properly. For it has
senses the same as our own; and sensations, revived, combined and noted
by signs, suffice to form "not only all our conceptions but again
all our faculties."[3406] An exact and constant relationship of ideas
attaches our simplest perceptions to the most complex sciences, and,
from the lowest to the highest degree, a scale is practicable; if the
scholar stops on the way it is owing to our having left too great an
interval between two degrees of the scale; let no intermediary degrees
be omitted and he will mount to the top of it. To this exalted idea
of the faculties of man is added a no less exalted idea of his heart.
Rousseau having declared this to be naturally good, the refined class
plunge into the belief with all the exaggerations of fashion and all the
sentimentality of the drawing-room. The conviction is widespread that
man, and especially the man of the people, is sensitive and affectionate
by nature; that he is immediately impressed by benefactions and disposed
to be grateful for them, that he softens at the slightest sign of
interest in him, and that he is capable of every refinement. A series of
engravings represents two children in a dilapidated cottage,[3407]
one five and the other three years old, by the side of an infirm
grandmother, one supporting her hea