being entitled: "Pas si eloigne
qu'on pense."]

BOOK FOURTH. THE PROPAGATION OF THE DOCTRINE.

CHAPTER I.--SUCCESS OF THIS PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE.--FAILURE OF THE SAME
PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND.

Several similar theories have in the past traversed the imagination of
men, and similar theories are likely do so again. In all ages and in all
countries, it sufficed that man's concept of his own nature changed for,
as an indirect consequence, new utopias and discoveries would sprout in
the fields of politics and religion.[4101]--But this does not suffice
for the propagation of the new doctrine nor, more important, for theory
to be put into practice. Although born in England, the philosophy of the
eighteenth century could not develop itself in England; the fever for
demolition and reconstruction remained but briefly and superficial
there. Deism, atheism, materialism, skepticism, ideology, the theory of
the return to nature, the proclamations of the rights of man, all the
temerities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal and Mandeville,
the bold ideas of Hume, Hartley, James Mill and Bentham, all the
revolutionary doctrines, were so many hotbed plants produced here and
there, in the isolated studies of a few thinkers: out in the open, after
blooming for a while, subject to a vigorous competition with the old
vegetation to which the soil belonged, they failed[4102].--On the
contrary, in France, the seed imported from England, takes root and
spreads with extraordinary vigor. After the Regency it is in full
bloom[4103]. Like any species favored by soil and climate, it invades
all the fields, appropriating light and air to itself, scarcely allowing
in its shade a few puny specimens of a hostile species, a survivor of
an antique flora like Rollin, or a specimen of an eccentric flora like
Saint-Martin. With large trees and dense thickets, through masses of
brushwood and low plants, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
Diderot, d'Alembert and Buffon, or Duclos, Mably, Condillac, Turgot,
Beaumarchais, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Barthelemy and Thomas, such as a
crowd of journalists, compilers and conversationalists, or the elite of
the philosophical, scientific and literary multitude, it occupies the
Academy, the stage, the drawing room and the debate. All the important
persons of the century are its offshoots, and among these are some of
the grandest ever produced by humanity.--This was possible because the
seed had fall