singularly gay, free,
sociable, and varied. The literature of the time was sure to
reflect, and does reflect, this universal rejection of the
restraints of the past age when the classic spirit had been supreme.

Apart from this kind of objection to its exact expression, let us
look at the substance of M. Taine's dictum. 'It was the classic
spirit, which, when applied to the scientific acquisitions of the
time, produced the philosophy of the century and the doctrines of
the Revolution.' Even if we substitute geometric or deductive
spirit for classic spirit, the proposition remains nearly as
unsatisfactory. What were the doctrines of the Revolution? The
sovereignty of the people, rights of man, liberty, equality,
fraternity, progress and perfectibility of the species--these were
the main articles of the new creed. M. Taine, like too many French
writers, writes as if these ideas had never been heard of before
'89. Yet the most important and decisive of them were at least as
old as the Reformation, were not peculiarly French in any sense, and
were no more the special products of the classic spirit mixing with
scientific acquisitions than they were the products of Manicheanism.
It is extraordinary that a writer who attributes so much importance
to Rousseau, and who gives us so ample an account of his political
ideas, should not have traced these ideas to their source, nor even
told us that they had a source wholly outside of France. Rousseau
was a Protestant; he was a native of the very capital and mother
city of Protestantism, militant and democratic; and he was
penetrated to his heart's core by the political ideas which had
arisen in Europe at the Reformation. There is not a single principle
in the Social Contract which may not be found either in Hobbes, or
in Locke, or in Althusen, any more than there is a single
proposition of his deism which was not in the air of Geneva when he
wrote his Savoyard Vicar. If this be the case, what becomes of the
position that the revolutionary philosophy was worked out by the
_raison raisonnante_, which is the special faculty of a country
saturated with the classic spirit? If we must have a formula, it
would be nearer the truth to say that the doctrines of the
Revolution were the product, not of the classic spirit applied to
scientific acquisitions, but, first, of the democratic ideas of the
Protestant Reformation, and then of the fictions of the lawyers,
both of them allied with certai