gher guidance
than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the
rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room
by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the
traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the
philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same
naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but
differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and
social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from
abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social
compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and
others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the
point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation
against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the
English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of
large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise,
had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy
and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of
abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received
startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.

The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and
circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr.
Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the
Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel,
existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise
remedies for the evils of an unwieldy and complicated administrative
machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr.
Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this
period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position
of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the
intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and
generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather
more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history
of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays
prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the
various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and
particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and
propagated them. It is for this l