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Updated: June 6, 2025
De Maistre's rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the very dregs of the ecclesiastical world.
I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly distinguish. While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre's delightful little book, "Voyage autour de ma Chambre," occurred to me.
To conclude, De Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological property of a natural object.
The recommendation of such a mind as De Maistre's is the intensity of its appreciation of order and social happiness.
At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the conscience of another?
There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that constitutions are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once. But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its constitution by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse.
In the nervous unsettled state of my mind at that moment, I found it much easier to make my inventory than to make my reflections, and thereupon soon gave up all hope of thinking in Le Maistre's fanciful track or, indeed, of thinking at all. I looked about the room at the different articles of furniture, and did nothing more.
Before passing on to that, it is worth while to make one remark. It will be inferred from De Maistre's general position that he was no friend to physical science.
It was computed at that time that the author of a philosophic piece could not safely count upon more than a hundred and fifty readers in Russia; and hence, we might be sure, even if we had not De Maistre's word for it, that away from his own house he left his philosophy behind. The vehemence of his own convictions did not prevent him from being socially tolerant to others who hated them.
In 1814 his wife and two daughters joined him in the Russian capital. Two years later an outburst of religious fanaticism caused the sudden expulsion of the Jesuits from Russia, to De Maistre's deep mortification.
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