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The ideals which animated the new writers the Philosophes, as they came to be called may be summed up in two words: Reason and Humanity.
On one side were all the forces of intellect; on the other was all the mass of entrenched and powerful dullness. In reply to the brisk fire of the Philosophes argument, derision, learning, wit the authorities in State and Church opposed the more serious artillery of censorships, suppressions, imprisonments, and exiles.
If we cannot hope to reach quite that height of excellence, let us at least try to get as near it as we can. So far from pressing on the work of civilization, with the Philosophes, let us try to forget that we are civilized and be natural instead. This was the burden of Rousseau's teaching, and it was founded on a complete misconception of the facts. The noble Indian was a myth.
I am independent and therefore perdition is my lot." On these words, he stopped writing, shut the book, and wrapped it in the black veil he had carried off. He then ransacked the drawers for paper and string, made up a parcel which he addressed to Miss Haldin, Boulevard des Philosophes, and then flung the pen away from him into a distant corner. This done, he sat down with the watch before him.
The marquises and abbés he met in France had dreamed over elementary principles of society and government, until they had lost themselves in wandering mazes like Milton's speculative and erring angels. He believed that those gay philosophes had discovered the magical stone of social science, and that misery and sin would be transmuted into virtue and happiness.
Ignorance is not a crime per se; but it is the mother of Superstition and Intolerance, those twin demons that have time and again deluged the world with blood and tears; that for forty centuries have stood like ravenous wolves in the path of human progress; that with their empoisoned fangs have torn a thousand times the snowy breast of Liberty that have done more to inspire Doubt and foster Infidelity than all the French philosophes that ever wielded pen.
Should it happen otherwise, the Christian will have an additional motive for cherishing his faith: but even the afflictions of humanity will not, I fear, produce either regret or conviction in his adversary; for the prejudices of philosophers and systemists are incorrigible.* * "Ce ne sont point les philosophes qui connoissent le mieux les hommes.
Miss Edgeworth's father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters, and belonged to the class of Englishmen who, without imbibing French freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the French philosophes; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose.
She averted her head again and looked down the Boulevard des Philosophes, a singularly arid and dusty thoroughfare, where nothing could be seen at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a pinafore hopping on one leg, and in the distance a workman wheeling a bicycle.
The free-thinking philosophes, who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did to L'Infâme, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the Bauern-krieg.
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