ory. Like everything else, history
suffered from the rule of Louis XIV. Again the advance was inaugurated
by Voltaire. His principle is to concentrate on important movements, not
on idle details. This was not characteristic of the individual author
only, but of the spirit of the age. It is equally present in the works
of Montesquieu and Turgot. The defects of Montesquieu are chiefly due to
the fact that his materials were intractable, because science had not
yet reduced them to order by generalising the laws of their phenomena.
In the second half of the eighteenth century the intellectual movement
began to be turned directly against the state. Economical and financial
inquiries began to absorb popular attention. Rousseau headed the
political movement, whereas the government in its financial straits
turned against the clergy, whose position was already undermined, and
against whom Voltaire continued to direct his batteries.

The suppression of the Jesuits meant a revival of Jansenism. Jansenism
is Calvinistic, and Calvinism is democratic; but the real concentration
of French minds was on material questions. The foundations of religious
beliefs had been undermined, and hence arose the painful prevalence of
atheism. The period was one of progress in the study of material laws in
every field. The national intellect had taken a new bent, and it was one
which tended to violent social revolt. The hall of science is the temple
of democracy. It was in these conditions that the eyes of Frenchmen were
turned to the glorious revolt in the cause of liberty of the American
people. The spark was set to an inflammatory mass, and ignited a flame
which never ceased its ravages until it had destroyed all that Frenchmen
once held dear.

_IV.---Reaction in Spain_

I have laid down four propositions which I have endeavoured to
establish--that progress depends on a successful investigation of the
laws of phenomena; that a spirit of scepticism is a condition of such
investigation; that the influence of intellectual truths increases
thereby relatively to that of moral truths; and that the great enemy of
his progress is the protective spirit. We shall find these propositions
verified in the history of Spain.

Physically, Spain most closely resembles those non-European countries
where the influence of nature is more prominent than that of man, and
whose civilisations are consequently influenced more by the imagination
than by the understa