hing of German thought. He was well read
in French philosophers, and in harmony with one leading sect. The
so-called _ideologues_,[464] who regarded Condillac as representing
the true line of intellectual progress, were in France the analogues
of the English Utilitarians. Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis were their
most conspicuous leaders in this generation. The philosophy of Reid
and Stewart crossed the channel, and supplied the first assailants of
the _ideologues_ with their controversial weapons. Thus, until the
German influence came to modify the whole controversy, the vital issue
seemed to lie between the doctrine of Reid or 'intuitionism' on the
one hand, and the purely 'experiential' school on the other, whether,
as in France, it followed Condillac, or, as in England, looked back
chiefly to Hartley. Both sections traced their intellectual ancestry
to Locke and Hobbes, with some reference to Bacon, and, by the French
writers, to Descartes. Stewart, again, as I have said, was the
accepted Whig philosopher. It is true that the Whig sat habitually in
the seat of Gallio. Jeffrey, whether he fully realised the fact or
not, was at bottom a sceptic in philosophy as in politics. John Allen,
the prophet of Holland House, was a thorough sceptic, and says[465]
that Horner, one of Stewart's personal admirers, was really a
follower of Hume. The Whigs were inclined to Shaftesbury's doctrine
that sensible men had all one religion, and that sensible men never
said what it was. Those who had a more definite and avowable creed
were content to follow Stewart's amiable philosophising. Brougham
professed, let us hope, sincerely, to be an orthodox theist, and
explained the argument from design in a commentary upon Paley. Sydney
Smith expounded Reid and Stewart in lectures which showed at least
that he was still a wit when talking 'philosophy' at the Royal
Institution; and, though he hated 'enthusiasm' in dissenters,
evangelicals, and tractarians, and kept religion strictly in its
place--a place well outside of practical politics--managed to preach a
wholesome, commonplace morality in terms of Christian theology. The
difference between the Whig and the Radical temper showed itself in
philosophical as in political questions. The Radical prided himself on
being logical and thoroughgoing, while the Whig loved compromise, and
thought that logic was very apt to be a nuisance. The systematic
reticence which the Utilitarians held to be necessary p