ful
process must consist in shifting the point of view, in enlarging the
range of the facts to be considered, in pressing the relativity of our
ideas, in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of anthropomorphism.

Hobbes's witty definition of the papacy as the ghost of the old Roman
Empire sitting enthroned on the grave thereof, may tempt us to forget
the all-important truth that the basis of the power of the ghost was
essentially different from that of the dissolved body. The Empire was a
political organisation, resting on military force. The Church was a
social organisation, made vital by a conviction. The greatest fact in
the intellectual history of the eighteenth century is the decisive
revolution that overtook that sustaining conviction. The movement and
the men whom we are studying owe all their interest to the share that
they had in this immense task. The central conception, that the universe
was called into existence only to further its Creator's purpose towards
man, became incredible. This absolute proposition was slowly displaced
by notions of the limitation of human faculties, and of the
comparatively small portion of the whole cosmos or chaos to which we
have reason to believe that these faculties give us access. To
substitute this relative point of view for the absolute, was the
all-important preliminary to the effectual breaking up of the great
Catholic construction.

What seems to careless observers a mere metaphysical dispute was in
truth, and still is, the decisive quarter of the great battle between
theology and a philosophy reconcilable with science. When the Catholic
reaction set in, Joseph de Maistre, by far its acutest champion in the
region of philosophy, at once made it his first business to attack the
principle of relativity with all his force of dialectic, and to
reinstate absolute modes of thinking, and the absolute quality of
Catholic propositions about religion, knowledge, and government.[73] Yet
neither he nor any one else on his side has ever effectively shaken the
solid argument which Diderot fancifully illustrated in the following
passage from his reply to Voltaire's letter of thanks for the opuscule:
"This marvellous order and these wondrous adaptations, what am I to
think of them? That they are metaphysical entities only existing in your
own mind. You cover a vast piece of ground with a mass of ruins falling
hither or thither at hazard; amid these the worm and the ant find
commodious sh