n urgent social and political
necessities.

So much, then, for the political side of the 'philosophy of the
century,' if we are to use this too comprehensive expression for all
the products of a very complex and many-sided outburst of
speculative energy. Apart from its political side, we find M.
Taine's formula no less unsatisfactory for its other phases. He
seems to us not to go back nearly far enough in his search for the
intellectual origins, any more than for the political origins, of
his contemporary France. He has taken no account of the progress of
the spirit of Scepticism from Montaigne's time, nor of the decisive
influence of Montaigne on the revolutionary thinkers. Yet the
extraordinary excitement aroused in France by Bayle's Dictionary was
a proof of the extent to which the sceptical spirit had spread
before the Encyclopaedists were born. The great influence of
Fontenelle was wholly in the same sceptical direction. There was a
strong sceptical element in French Materialism, even when
materialism was fully developed and seemed most dogmatic.[2] Indeed,
it may sometimes occur to the student of such a man as Diderot to
wonder how far materialism in France was only seized upon as a means
of making scepticism both serious and philosophic. For its turn for
scepticism is at least as much a distinction of the French
intelligence as its turn for classicism. And, once more, if we must
have a formula, it would be best to say that the philosophy of the
century was the product, first of scepticism applied to old beliefs
which were no longer easily tenable, and then of scepticism,
extended to old institutions that were no longer practically
habitable.

[2] See Lange's _Geschichte des Materialismus_, i. 298.

And this brings us to the cardinal reason for demurring to M.
Taine's neatly rounded proposition. His appreciation of the
speculative precursors of the Revolution seems to us to miss the
decisive truth about them. He falls precisely into those errors of
the _raison raisonnante_, about which, in his description of the
intellectual preparation of the great overthrow, he has said so many
just and acute things. Nothing can be more really admirable than M.
Taine's criticism upon Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, as
great masters of language (pp. 339-361). All this is marked by an
amplitude of handling, a variety of approach, a subtlety of
perception, a fulness of comprehension, which give a very different
noti