, Sodom would have banished him.[3] Locke, again, did
not understand himself. His distinguishing characteristics are
feebleness and precipitancy of judgment. Vagueness and irresolution
reign in his expressions as they do in his thoughts. He constantly
exhibits that most decisive sign of mediocrity--he passes close by the
greatest questions without perceiving them. In the study of philosophy,
contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge.[4] Condillac was even
more vigilantly than anybody else on his guard against his own
conscience. But Hume was perhaps the most dangerous and the most guilty
of all those mournful writers who will for ever accuse the last century
before posterity--the one who employed the most talent with the most
coolness to do most harm.[5] To Bacon De Maistre paid the compliment of
composing a long refutation of his main ideas, in which Bacon's
blindness, presumption, profanity, and scientific charlatanry are
denounced in vehement and almost coarse terms, and treated as the
natural outcome of a low morality.

It has long been the inglorious speciality of the theological school to
insist in this way upon moral depravity as an antecedent condition of
intellectual error. De Maistre in this respect was not unworthy of his
fellows. He believed that his opponents were even worse citizens than
they were bad philosophers, and it was his horror of them in the former
capacity that made him so bitter and resentful against them in the
latter. He could think of no more fitting image for opinions that he did
not happen to believe than counterfeit money, 'which is struck in the
first instance by great criminals, and is afterwards passed on by honest
folk who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they do.' A
philosopher of the highest class, we may be sure, does not permit
himself to be drawn down from the true object of his meditations by
these sinister emotions. But De Maistre belonged emphatically to minds
of the second order, whose eagerness to find truth is never intense and
pure enough to raise them above perturbing antipathies to persons. His
whole attitude was fatal to his claim to be heard as a truth-seeker in
any right sense of the term. He was not only persuaded of the general
justice and inexpugnableness of the orthodox system, but he refused to
believe that it was capable of being improved or supplemented by
anything which a temperate and fair examination of other doctrines might
peradventure be f