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Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, which may claim to be the parent work of modern social science, Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, and Turgot's plan of a Histoire universelle begin a new era in man's vision of the past. Montesquieu was not among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It never secured any hold upon his mind.
It is the whole of women, who are guided by nothing else: and it has so much to say, even with men, and the ablest men too, that it commonly triumphs in every struggle with the understanding. Monsieur de Rochefoucault, in his "Maxims," says, that 'l'esprit est souvent la dupe du coeur. If he had said, instead of 'souvent, tresque toujours', I fear he would have been nearer the truth.
Darwin has given, and see nothing there but a "derniere erreur du dernier siecle " a personification of Nature leads us indeed to cry with him: "O lucidite! O solidite de l'esprit Francais, que devenez-vous?" M. Flourens has, in fact, utterly failed to comprehend the first principles of the doctrine which he assails so rudely.
This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature is not excluded from participating in the common development of civilisation? His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754.
Queen Elizabeth was well aware of all, but she never took my action amiss; she understood that I had to deliver the messages, but that it was not I who composed them. Queen Elizabeth was a good, clever and touchingly simple woman, not a poet qui court après l'esprit, but a woman who looked at the world through conciliatory and poetical glasses.
So powerful is the magic influence of organized masses, marching under the orders of a chief, and stimulated by l'esprit de corps. It was truly admirable to see with what address and rapidity the three or four hundred men, who had hastened to Bois-Monzil, passed and repassed the buckets, by forming a chain to the bottom of the mine. But their generous efforts became too fatiguing to last long.
In the first phase the indemnities came into being from three words inserted almost by chance into the armistice treaty on November 2, 1918, réparation des dommages. It was merely a matter of a simple expression to content public feeling: Je supplie le conseil de se mettre dans l'esprit de la population française.... It was a moral concession, a moral satisfaction.
A portion of Dr. Bluntschli's work has been translated into English and published under the title The Theory of the State. There is also a French translation of this work. Other authorities under this head are: Bluntschli's Staatswörterbuch; Woolsey's Political Science, or the State Theoretically and Practically Considered; and Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des Lois.
It was happily said that Montesquieu ought to have changed the name of his book from "L'Esprit des Lois" to "L'Esprit sur les Lois". In the same manner the philosopher of Palmyra ought to have entitled his famous work, not "Longinus on the Sublime," but "The Sublimities of Longinus."
On the whole it may not be the wiser plan to write about the Origins of Religion in the style which might suit a study of the life of ballet dancers; the two MM. Halevy, the learned and the popular, would make a blunder if they exchanged styles. Yet Gibbon never denies himself a jest, and Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois was called L'Esprit sur les Lois.
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