Martin's History of France. The Decline of the French Monarchy ... Translated from the fourth Paris edition. By M. L. Booth

Front matter

History of France, FROM THE MOST REMOTE PERIOD TO 1789 BY HENRI MARTIN. 3?ulvis veterum renovabitur. AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE FOURTH PARIS EDITION, By MARY L. BOOTH. VOLUME XVI. BOSTON: WALKER, FULLER, AND COMPANY. 186 6. This work has reeeii£d.ffie'3jbfyqt\Gobert Prize from the Academy of Inscriptions and Belks-Lettres and the French Academy. v_~- '-'■''■ \ j J / IF Ji AH JJ J5 iP&B P Ji 0' Y J HOI \oltl) MARTIN'S HISTORY OF FRANCE. THE DECLINE OF TILE FRENCH MONARCHY. By HENRI MARTIN. TRANSLATED FROM THE FOURTH PARIS EDITION, Bx MARY L. BOOTH. VOL. II. BOSTON; WALKER, FULLER, AND COMPANY. 1866. Entered, according Ur Act os Congress, in the year 1865, by WALKER, FULLER, JVND.' COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Geo. C. Rand & Avery, Stereotypers and Printers, 3 Comhill, Boston. CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

Chapter I

The Philosophers. (Contimied.) Page Voltaire and the Enctclopedists. Voltaire at Berlin and Ferney. Candide. Developments of the Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century. Metaphysics of Condillae. Ethics of Helvetius. Progress of the Sciences. D'Alembert. Natural Sciences. Buffon. Natural Histoet. History and Theory of the Earth. Epochs of Nature. History of Animals. Naturalism. Diderot. His First Writings. His Association with D'Alembert. Universality of Diderot. The Encyclopædia. The Preliminary Discourse. Æsthetics of Diderot. Materialism. (1748-1774.) 1 CHAPTER H. The Philosophers. (Continued.) Rousseau. Spiritualism revived through Sentiment. Religious and Democratic Philosophy. Origin and Youth of Rousseau. Dissertation on the Sciences. Dissertation on Inequality. Essay on the Origin of Languages.

The NewHeloise. Emile. The Savoyard Vicar. Sociax Contract. Letters from the Mountain. (1749-1767.) 54 CHAPTER HI. The Philosophers. (Continued.) Rousseau and the Philosophers. The Economists. Rousseau's Influence upon Writers. Voltaire modified by Rousseau. Reforms demanded by Voltaire. Voltaire and the Parliaments. Calas. Resistance of Materialistic Philosophy. Atheistic Propaganda of D'Holbach. Communism. Morelli. Mabli : his Political and Social Ideas. Rousseau's Influence on Manners and Arts. Gretri. Gluck. Louis David. Political Economy. Physiocrats. Quesnai. Gournai. Turgot, the Economist and Philosopher. (1762- 1774.J 119 v CONTENTS. VI

CHAPTER IV.

Louis XV. (Concluded.) Paje Choiseul's Ministry. Trial of Father La Valette. Official Reports concerning the Constitutions of the Jesuits. The Jesuits suppressed in France. Abolition of the Order by Pope Clement XIV. Contention between the Court and the Parliaments. Death of Madame de Pompadour. Invasion of the Economists in Politics. First Experiments of Commercial and Industrial Freedom. New Quarrels with the Parliaments. Trial of La Chalotais. Death of the Dauphin. Choiseul's Projects for the Revival of France. Improvements in the Army and the Marine. Acquisition of Corsica. Paoli Affairs of Poland. Catharine and Frederick II. Confederation of Bar. Massacres in the Ukraine. The Poles and \J. J. Rousseau. Dumouriez in Poland. War between Russia and Turkey. Projects of Prussia and Austria for the Partition of Poland.

Marriage of the New Dauphin to Marie Antoinette. Terrai, Comptroller-General. System of Bankruptcy. Fall of Choiseul. Reign of Madame du Barri. Triumvirate of Maupeou, Terrai, and D'Aiguillon. Destruction of the Parliaments. Russia accedes to the Plans of Frederick II. Partition of Poland. The Minister, D'Aiguillon, abandons Poland. England an Accomplice. Pact of Famine. The King a Monopolizer. Death of Louis XV. (1763-1774.) .179

CHAPTER V.

Louis XVI. and Turgot. Louis XVI. and his Family. Maurepas summoned to Power. Fall of the Triumvirate. Turgot Comptroller-General. His Plans of Reform : the Great Municipality os the Kingdom, etc. Reestablishment of the Parliaments. Economic Reforms. Freedom of the Grain-trade. Attack of Necker upon the Plans of Turgot. Coalition of the Privileged Classes against Turgot. The Philosophers divided on the Economic Question. Voltaire the Champion of Turgot. The Flour War. The Sedition fomented by the Privileged Classes repressed. Celebrated Remonstrances of the Court of Aids against the Fiscal System. Their Author, Malesherbes, summoned to the Ministry. Numerous Economic Ameliorations. Military Reforms of the Count de Saint-Germain. Abolition of the Corve'e. Abolition of Wardcnsbips and Masterships of Trade Corporations.

Establishment of the Freedom of Commerce and Manufactures. Resistance of the Parliament, and Violent Attacks on Turgot. Bed of Justice. Freedom of the Wine-trade. The Princes, Maurepas, the Court, and theParliament unite against Turgot. Fall of Turgot and Malesherbes. (1774-1776.) 279

CHAPTER VI.

Louis XVI. (Continued.) American War. Opening of the Era of the Revolution. Clugni, Comptroller-General. Reaction. The Lottery. Reestablishment of the Corve'e. Reestablishment of the Trade Wardenships and Masterships. Death of Clugni. The Reaction arrested. Necker, Director of Finance. Reestablishment of CONTENTS. VII Page Order in the Accounts and of the Public Credit. Divers Reforms. Voltaire at Paris. Death of Voltaire and Rousseau. American Revolution. De claration of RiGnTS. Public Opinion aroused in Favor of the Insurgents. Curious Role of Beaumarchais. Indirect Aid furnished by the Government to the Insurgents. Declaration of Independence of the United States. La Fayette in America. The Government drawn on by Public Opinion. Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States. Rupture with England.

Naval Battle of Ushant. India neglected. Loss of Pondicherry. D'Estaing's Expedition to America. Capture of Dominica. Loss of St. Lucia. Conquest of Senegal. Mediation of France between Austria and Prussia. Peace of Tcschcn. Alliance between Spain and France. Capture of St. Vincent and Grenada. Repulse at Savannah. Exploits of the French Navy. Invasion of Florida by the Spaniards. Success of Guichen against Rodney. Rochambeau's Expedition to the United States. Acts of Violence of the British Navy against Neutrals. Armed Neutrality of the North. England attacks Holland, and invades her Colonies. Conquest of Minorca. Capture of Tobago. Capitulation of Yorktown : a British Army surrenders to the Franco-Americans. Recapture of the Dutch Colonies in America. Taking of St. Christopher. Fall of Necker.

Loss of a Naval Battle in the West Indies. Fruitless Attack on Gibraltar. Tardy Efforts in India. Suffren. Six Naval Battles in Two Years. Recapture of Trincomalee. Bussi sent back to India. Uyder-Ali and Tippo-Saib. Suffren saves Bussi, besieged in Goude lorc by the English. He is arrested by Peace. New Treaties of Paris. Eng land recognizes the Independence of the United States. France retains none of her Conquests except Tobago and Senegal, and recovers what she had lost during the War. Spain keeps Minorca and the Floridas. (1776-1783.) . 346 CHAPTER VH. Louis XVI. (Continued.) Necker's Ministry. Financial Condition of France, under Necker and his Successors, to 1783. Economic and Judicial Improvements. Provincial Assemblies. Official Report of the Finances. Dismission of Necker. Reaction.

Death of Maurepas. Calonne called to the Finances. Manners, Ideas, Letters, and Sciences after the American War. The Circle of the Queen. The Marriage of Figaro. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Lagrange. Lavoisier. The Aerostats. Condorcet. Mystical Movement. Mesmer. Saint-Martin. Freemasonry. Mirabeau. (1778-17S9.) 443 CHAPTER VHI. Louis XVI. (Concluded.) Last Days of the Monarchy. Ministry of Calonne. Financial Chaos. The Diamond Necklace. Calonne attempts to undertake Reform in his Turn. Assembly of the Notables. Acknowledgment of the Deficit. Fall of Calonne. Ministry of Brienne. Renewal of the Dissensions between the Crown and the Parliaments. The Parliament of Paris demands the States- General. Humiliation Abroad. Affairs of Holland. Brienne imitates Mau- CONTENTS. VIII Page 487 peou's Opposition to the Parliaments.

The Plenary Court. The Nobility supports the Parliaments. Disturbances in Brittany, Beam, and Dauphiny. Assembly of Vizille. Promise of the States-General for 1789. Beginning of Bankruptcy. Fall of Brienne. Recall of Necker. Second Assembly of the Notables. Great Movement of the Political Press. Contest between the Third Estate and the Privileged Orders. Pamphlet of Sieyes, What is the Third Estate-? Disturbances in Brittany. Mirabeau in Provence. The Elections. The Cahiers. Opening of the States-General. The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly. End of the Ancient Regime and of the Monarchy. (1783-1789.) DECLINE OF THE MONARCHY.

CHAPTER I. THE PHILOSOPHERS.

(Continued.) Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Voltaire at Berlin and Ferney. Candide. Developments of the Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century. Metaphysics of Condillac. Ethics of Helvetius. Progress of the Sciences. D'Alembert. Natural Sciences. Buffon. Natural History. History and Theory of the Ear-th. Epochs of Nature. History of Animals. Naturalism. Diderot. His First Writings. His Association with D'Alembert. Universality of Diderot. The Encyclopædia. T/ie Preliminary Discourse. Æsthetics of Diderot. Materialism. 1748-1774. It is time to return to the history of ideas, which, during almost all this century, unfolds side by side with the history of events, the one increasing in importance in proportion as the other di minishes. On passing from political intrigues and material strife to intellectual strife, from the generals and favorites of Louis XV. to the writers and the philosophers, we seem passing from pygmies to Titans.

Here even the errors are excesses of energy and daring : they attest the vigor of the minds led astray by their very vitality. During the first period of the eighteenth century, a single man has almost unceasingly occupied the stage, — a kind of Briareus of philosophy, aiming at every thing, meditating on every thing, striking everywhere, as if he had a hundred heads and hands. This will not be the case henceforth. Voltaire will lose nothing of his activity or his genius ; he will even grow in authority among the nations ; but his authority will no longer be unique and undis puted in the army of innovators : his boldness will be surpassed both in good and evil, and new heroes will rush unshielded, with more passionate impetuosity, into that arena, constantly fuller and more tumultuous, where Montesquieu, hitherto his sole VOL. II. 1 THE PHILOSOPHERS. 1750-1753. 2 rival, has appeared only at rare intervals with measured steps and well covered with defensive armor.

The career of Voltaire was clearly divided into two parts by his departure for Berlin in 1750. We need not recount this so journ in Prussia, which he has traced himself with his inimitable pen ; and we shall not undertake to sketch the history of that wholly -French Academy of Berlin, which exercised such notable influence over the spirit of Northern Germany : this subject has been treated in a recent work with all the elaborateness desirable.1 The important point to be noted here is, that it was there that Atheism exhibited itself systematically and unveiled before daring to do so in France, and there also that Voltaire, who had as yet opposed, more or less openly, only positive religion and Car tesian spiritualism, had a first conflict with_ Atheism, and played the part of defender, after having always been the assailant ; thus marking the fixed point where he would have gladly arrested the progress of destruction.

In his cynical works, La Mettrie, Frederick's physician, combining the mechanical physics of Des cartes, separated from his metaphysics, with sensualism, denied all morality, all conscience, and all distinction between good and evil, and made the world an eternal aggregate of movements with out a motive power, and man a sensitive machine. Voltaire replied by the poem, The Natural Law, an eloquent manifesto of Deism and of Universal Morality.2 Frederick, the judge of the field, left full liberty to the combatants ; and all opinions, Catho licism excepted, had a place in his academy. Protestant Chris tianity was gloriously represented therein by the philosopher geom etrician, Euler, whom France can claim to a certain degree, since he wrote part of his works in French, like Leibnitz, especially his Letters to a German Princess.

The master's taste, nevertheless caused the sceptical and mocking philosophy to predominate, which was not displeasing to the most illustrious of his guests. Voltaire passed a few months of real enchantment in this soci ety sparkling with wit and sarcastic gayety. Divided between labor and pleasure, — the pleasure of the mind, which had always been the first, and which was now the only one to him, he had never so fully lived. Far from forgetting the mother-country in this little philosophic France, whose royalty he shared with Fred- 1 Histoire de l'Acad€mie des sciences de Berlin, by M. Bartholmess, crowned by the French Academy. 2 Written in 1751, published in 1756, and condemned by the parliament, although the Christian dogmas were not attacked in it : the Jansenist sect was, however. 1750-1753.

VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK. 3 erick, he became more patriotic at a distance, and finished his na tional work, The Age of Louis XIV., at the same time with The Essay on the Manners of Nations. Fire flashed in a continuous jet from his pen as from his lips. The prestige was of short duration. It is the heart, and not the mind, that makes lasting bonds. The charm that Frederick knew how to give to his intercourse could not long conceal the coldness of his soul : could he have exhausted in one evening the wit of his friends, he would have thrown them away the next day like a squeezed orange, — an incomprehensible man, born to inspire as tonishment, and not affection ; admirable in conversation and familiar correspondence ; mediocre with the pen in hand, when the German monarch, become a French author, struggled with the dif ficulties of a foreign language ;x compelling the respect of Europe by his martial prodigies and his administrative wisdom ; and ren dering himself the laughing-stock of courts by the eccentricities of bad poetry, and by an ignoble and revolting vice.

The tyrannical selfishness of Frederick, the susceptibility and irascibleness of Voltaire, and the jealous intrigues of Maupertuis, the President of the Academy, who was overshadowed by the proximity of this powerful name, soon brought about coolness, unfriendly behavior, and dissensions, followed by hollow reconcil iations. The scandalous rupture in which this so much vaunted friendship ended — the presage of the destined issue of all alliances between absolutism and philosophy — is familiar to all (1753). Every one knows the story of Voltaire's captivity at Frankfort, in the hands of the recruiting agents of the King of Prussia, — Alex ander transformed into Dionysius of Syracuse. Frederick was ashamed of it, however. He employed grace and address in re pairing his errors ; and the philosopher and the king became reconciled afterwards, but at a distance : they could not refrain from liking each other ; but Voltaire pardoned only by halves, as was proved by his terrible secret Memoirs.

Escaped from the Prussian claws, Voltaire was unwilling to return to Paris, where the antipathy, or rather the fear, of the King, permitted him no security. He wandered about for some time in Lorraine and Alsace. Harassed by the clergy, he repaired to Geneva by the way of Lyons : the popular ovation which he re ceived in the latter city manifested to him the progress that his t His political and military Memoirs, our principal authority with respect to the wars of these times, are infinitely superior to his purely literary works ; but he is far in these from Cæsar and Napoleon. 1753-1755. 4 THE PHILOSOPHERS. name and ideas had made in France. He chose the place of his final settlement with great adroitness. He purchased two houses near Geneva and Lausanne ; then a third in the territory of Gex, the chateau of Ferney, which became his habitual residence some years after, when political disturbances had disgusted him with the city of Calvin.

He thus had a footing at once in France, in Berne, and in Geneva ; and secured himself time, in case of a storm, to shelter his person from danger, and, in ordinary times, facilities for supervising the publication of his works, whether ac knowledged or anonymous, to which the interest of commerce, as well as the taste for letters, guaranteed the tolerance of the Gene vese magistrates. Descartes had formerly sought an obscure retreat in order to think : Voltaire made himself a brilliant soli tude in order to act. Les DeTices and Ferney were to him a little kingdom, so to speak. All Europe viewed him from afar, seated, like the God of tempests, between the Alps and the Jura ; and philosophy had its place of pilgrimage, whither the adepts of the new ideas were to journey, for twenty years and more, to salute their patriarch, and whither even crowned heads were to throng.

Voltaire had worthily inaugurated his accession by his beauti ful Epistle to Liberty (1755) : the Alps and the heroic traditions of the republican Helvetia had well inspired him : nevertheless, this period was the most painful of his moral life. The disen chantment with respect to Frederick had left his soul silled with bitterness : the scourges which, at that very moment, Nature and kings were vying with each other in letting loose on humanity, disordered his imagination, and saddened his heart. An earth quake which shook the West from Sahara to the North Sea had just destroyed the principal towns of Morocco, and overthrown Lisbon upon thousands of corpses (November, 1755) ; and the Seven-years' War was begun by the gigantic piracies of those Eng lishmen whom Voltaire had celebrated as a nation of sages, aud continued by the mad French invasion which Madame de Pom padour precipitated upon Germany.

Surrounded with so many misfortunes, crimes, and follies, the disciple of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke lost his belief in that theory of optimism which had long been the connecting link of his thoughts, and to which the course of life had already dealt so many blows. Thence pro ceeded the poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, and the novel Can dide, the same thought expressed under two such opposite forms : here a hymn of suffering, abrupt, heart-rending, pathetic to sub limity, rising to God as the plaint of unhappy humanity ; there 1755-1756. CANDIDE. 5 a long and acrid satire, in which the all is good of optimism be comes the text for inexhaustible raillery of facts ; a bitter laughter, a sardonic gayety, which gnaws the heart like a serpent's tooth. Candide is, of all the works of Voltaire, the one that has been the worst judged : it has been ascribed to him as a crime equal to the unpardonable sin of the Maid of Orleans.

There has been seen in it a cruel sport, an impious derision of the human race, the work of a satanic genius. The moral state of the writer at the epoch when the work was conceived has been wholly disregarded. This book is assuredly very painful to read ; but the reader suffers only because the author has suffered. His soul, so mobile, and so well armed by its mobility against suffering, never perhaps experienced such anxieties as at the moment when it thus burst forth into convulsive laughter. Candide is, to speak truly, a renunciation of all system. Vol taire abandons all explanation of man and the universe, and remains clinging in empty space to a vague and obscure Deism, without final causes, without enthusiasm, and without consolation. He no longer had a system : others were about to make a system after him, beyond him, in spite of him ; they were about to deduce fatalism and pure materialism from his inconsistent sensualism, and Atheism or universal scepticism from his Deism devoid of basis and authority.

Thinkers more eloquent and more authoritative, hearts more upright, than La Mettrie, were about to follow to the end the old path of Epicures and Lucretius, the highway to annihilation. They did not straightway proceed thither. The progress was varied, complicated, and embarrassed with singular contradictions. We must thread this labyrinth, each winding of which offers a lesson and points out a quicksand to posterity. At the very beginning appeared the most brilliant of the contradictions that we de nounce. A new system of metaphysics was formulated for the use of the sensualists and the fatalists by a philosopher who was neither the one nor the other, and who, spiritualistic and almost idealistic, lent to materialism, without desiring it, its most formidable weapon. Voltaire had introduced Locke into France, and imbued all his works with the principles of Locke ; but he had added nothing to these principles, and had not published his own Treatise on Meta physics, which, moreover, has neither the method nor the rigor of a system.

It is a characteristic fact, that the man who gave to the eighteenth century its metaphysical formula, however eminent 1746. 6 THE PHILOSOPHERS. may have been his merit, too much depreciated in our days, was not one of the great geniuses of the epoch, one of those brilliant names which will live forever in the memory of multitudes. The reason was that the eighteenth century was a polemical and political, much more than a metaphysical age : its glory was in po lemics and politics, and not in metaphysics. The Abbe de Condillac,1 a man of lucid mind, and a correct and pure writer, less practical, and mingling less with active life, but more of a dialectician, and especially more of a geometrician, than Locke, seemed destined, by the nature of his intellect, to attach himself to Cartesianism rather than to the doctrine import ed from England.

In the first chapter of his first work, the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), he began, in fact, by refuting the doubt of Locke, repeated to satiety by Voltaire, " Can the body think ? " and demonstrated in a solid and luminous manner the unity, simplicity, and indivisibility of the soul or the thinking subject. He went farther, and seemed to draw the induction, not only that the soul exists, but that it is the only certain existence. " Whether we mount to the skies or de scend to the lowest depths, we do not go out of ourselves, and we never perceive any thing but our own thought." " The modifications of the soul," he says elsewhere, " become the qualities of every thing that exists outside of it." What was to be expected from this starting-point if not a development, or, at most, a reformation of rationalism, an effort to re vive the French metaphysical school ?

If danger existed, there was reason to believe that it was on the side of idealistic scepti cism, of that theory which refuses certainty to the external world, insufficiently demonstrated by pure reason. Strange infirmity of the human mind ! This same philosopher was about to carry the system of sensation farther than Locke ; to construct it, at least in appearance, with a rigor which the latter had not possessed ; and to sweep from this system all that still op posed obstacles to materialism. To discard from metaphysics hypotheses and rash aspirations ; to know how to confine one's self to the limits which nature has fixed for the human mind, — such was the end proposed by Condil lac. "The first object," he says, "should be the study of the human mind, not to discover its inexplicable nature, but to know its operations.

It is necessary to go back to the origin of our 1 Born at Grenoble in 1715. 1746-1754. CONDILLAC. 7 ideas, to develop their generation, and to follow them to the bounds prescribed by nature, in order to fix the extent of our knowledge, and to regenerate the human understanding by limit ing it to its true objects." From the first step, it is objected, are we not already beyond observation and analysis, which would begin, on their side, by ver ifying the nature of our ideas before seeking their origin in the cradle of our obscure infancy ? To go back by an a priori to this origin, which cannot be directly observed, — is not this precisely beginning by an hypothesis ? " My design," he continues, " is to refer to a single principle all that concerns the human understanding." Here, there is no doubt, we are really in the domain of the a priori and the hypothesis !

This principle is that all our ideas, and all our knowledge, come from the senses ; that perception or sensation is the first operation of the soul, and the one which, by transforming itself, successively becomes all the others. Consciousness, attention, and reminiscence are only the three degrees of transformed sensation, which then ex perience new transformations. Locke is thus exceeded. He had reserved, by the side of the passive principle of sensation, the active principle of reflection : here sensation is every thing. Con dillac, notwithstanding, believed that the soul possessed an activity of its own. A very explicit passage may be quoted from him concerning the power and the active character of reflection, a passage which appears irreconcilable with the formulas of his sys tem : the reason of this is, that, to arrive at his single principle, he had confounded the active and the passive, sensation and reflection, and believed sensation itself active.

But his disciples would not stop at this confusion of terms, but would carry the theory to its logical consequences, following common sense as to the passiv ity of sensation. It was not worth while to write a treatise On Systems against systems (1749), and to attack so warmly, in the name of observation and experiment, the abstract principles and hypotheses of Plato or Descartes, of Malebranche or Leibnitz, only to end one's self in a system much less specious than those which were at tacked. Descartes, at least, had established his first principle, and made hypotheses only in setting out from what was above hypothesis. The theory of Condillac was completed in the Treatise on Sen- 1754. 8 sations (1754). ' We shall not follow him through his famous metaphysical novel, Tlie Animated Statue.

A fatalistic and materialistic philosopher would not have arranged his plan differently: not only the innate ideas, but the essential faculties, of the mind appear to be denied here : the mind is nothing but a blank tablet ; the soul is absolutely void until sensation comes to write on this tablet. This statue, this inert matter which he takes for a sub ject, and which does not offer the least relation to the real being, to the infant man, a nature active in its essence and from its origin, he awakens to life, we know not how, by a first sensation, the prin ciple not only of all the ideas, but of the faculties themselves, which are nothing but acquired habits, and not preexisting tenden cies. The desire and the will are, like the ideas and the faculties, nothing but transformed sensations.

Our ideas are all relative to our manner of feeling, and representatives of the objects of our sensations : there are, therefore, no absolute and general ideas. The Ego of the Statue, its personality, is only the collection of the sensations which it experiences, and those of which it is reminded by memory. The moral ideas themselves are not independent of the senses : the morality of actions consists only in their conformity with laws. Now, these actions are visible, and the laws likewise, since the laws are agreements made by men, — agreements, it is true, which should not be arbitrary, but dictated by nature according to our necessities and faculties. All this is very unmeta physical, if metaphysics is the science of principles and causes : laws are differently defined by Montesquieu ! We arc not ignorant that Condillac always implies the being one and simple, the substance under the phenomena ; but, after him, this reservation would be abolished ; and besides, this being, if it existed, would exist without liberty.

It was in vain that Condillac struggled against this consequence ; it was in vain that he wrote a treatise on Free Will, and sought to prove the existence of God : sensation can give neither God nor liberty ; it can arrive neither at the principle of causality nor at general ideas. The French mind must have been absorbed by a strange preoc cupation for such a system to have reigned almost undisputed over metaphysics for more than half a century.2 It must have 1 This treatise was prepared with the assistance of a woman, Mademoiselle Ferrand, who died before the publication of the common work. 2 Until La Romiguere, who, while defending Condillac against the imputation of ma- 1754. CONDILLAC. 9 wandered far from the way of abstract truth, and been fully en grossed by the struggle with realities.

During another and the last half century, the doctrine of sensation, expelled from philosophy, but taking refuge in the sciences, has left only too many traces in the ideas and habits of the present generation. Whatever may have been the errors of Condillac, and their fatal consequences, he will keep his place in the sacred chair of philosophy. He had the merit of putting an end to a confusion between the faculties and the ideas which had misled his most illustrious predecessors. He sought to analyze the faculties of the soul, and to discern their connection and order ; and, although he was unsuccessful, credit should be given him for the example and effort. He rendered a still greater service. On disengaging his real thought from his erroneous formulas, it will be recognized that no one since Descartes has lent a more effective support to the doctrine of the unity of the human being.

Descartes had said that the whole peculiarity of the soul is only that of thinking. Un less a forced interpretation is given to the word " thought," this excessive and incomplete definition leaves a certain advantage, either to the materialistic critic or to the old scholastic opinions concerning the two souls, — the reasoning and the sensitive. Con dillac, in defining the soul as a substance that feels, a substance capable of sensation, completed Descartes.1 He explicitly asserted what Descartes believed at heart, that the soul alone feels by rea son of the organs ; that every thing is in the soul ; and openly applied this principle to all the animated beings that Descartes had banished to the mechanical world. I feel, therefore I am, there fore I have a soul (or rather i" am a soul} , is not less true than I think, therefore I am : only it cannot be made the basis of a method, since to philosophize it is not enough to be a passivity that terialism, overthrew his theory by substituting for sensation the active and voluntary principle of attention as the starting-point of a whole system of the faculties and operations of the soul.