s of religion or deistic mysticism, or of social
_convenances_, which we have now discovered to be by no means granite,
but some sort of sea deposit, of hardened sand, whose formation we
understand and no longer rely upon. The most arrant sceptics of the past
had always one great safety, that they were in a groove; they saw,
understood, sympathized with only their own civilization. What they
thought right they had never seen questioned--they never imagined any
one could regard as wrong; hence the most liberal thinkers of former
days always strike us, with their blindness to all but their own
civilization, as such Philistines. Things have changed since then;
they began to change already, as soon as men began to look at other
civilizations; and the suggestive first-fruit of this early ethnographic
eclecticism may be seen in Diderot's very beastly books: he found that
the South Sea Islanders had not, on the subject of incest, the same
views as Christian folk; whereupon it struck him that those views
might be due to prejudice. It was not the development of the natural
sciences, but rather of the historic and ethnographic, which upset
people's ideas; it was the discovery of how our institutions, moral and
social (hitherto regarded as come straight from heaven), had formed
themselves, and how they were subject to variation. Speaking of poets,
look at a pure man, I believe a very pure man, Shelley, if you want to
understand the necessity of poets having a greater solidity of moral
judgment than the mere Jones and Browns who stick to their shop, and are
not troubled with theories. Add to the influence of scientific doubt,
of the doubt created by books on the origin of ideas and institutions
(showing of what moonshine they are often made), the utterly confusing
effect of our modern literary eclecticism, our comprehension and
sympathy with so many and hostile states of civilization, our jumbling
together of antique and mediaeval, of barbarous and over-ripe and effete
civilizations, our intellectual and moral absorption of incompatible
past stages of thought and feeling, with the follies and vices inherent
in each;--sum up all this, and you will see that, with our science
and our culture, our self-swamping with other folk's ideas, we are
infinitely less morally steady than the good sceptics of the days of
Voltaire, who always believed in the supremacy of their own century,
their own country, their own institutions, their own convent