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The horror and disgrace of such a situation were too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver like Loménie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet, might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and eccentric scrupulosity.
Granier de Cassagnac, "Histoire du Directoire," II., 24-170. Apologia for the men of September, "who have only been the priests, the sacrificers of a just immolation for public security. Cf. Morellet, II., 434-470. The slightest stain of incivism, the slightest negligence in the service, caused their rejection.
Palissot produced his comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers . Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg, instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her. Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite detected a reference to Madame de Robecq.
One of the disputants, certainly not the least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was violent in discussion, says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.
The votary of the Encyclopedists had witnessed the conversion of La Harpe; he had buried Lebrun-Pindare and Marie-Joseph de Chenier, and Morellet, and Madame Helvetius. He assisted at the quasi-fall of Voltaire when assailed by Geoffroy, the continuator of Freton.
But the bêtes all flocked to the salon bourgeois, and consequently a more brilliant gathering never assembled in a salon; here sat, enjoying the liberal hospitalities, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Mairan, Marmontel, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, Thomas, D'Holbach, Hume, Morellet, Mlle. de Lespinasse, the Marquis de Duras, Comtesses d'Egmont and de Brionne.
The youngest of the band was Condorcet, who was born nearly seventy years later . One veteran, Morellet, who had been, the schoolmate of Turgot and Loménie de Brienne, lived to think of many things more urgent than Faith, Fils de Dieu, and Fundamentals.
Younger men of the most various type, from Morellet down to Joubert, men quite competent to detect mere bombast or ardent vagueness, were held captive by the cogency of his understanding. His writings have none of this compulsion. We see the flame, but through a veil of interfused smoke. The expression is not obscure, but it is awkward; not exactly prolix, but heavy, overcharged, and opaque.
M. Suard, the Abbé Morellet, the Marquis de Boufflers, the frequenters of the drawing-rooms of Madame d'Houdetot and of Madame de Rumford, who received me with extreme complaisance, smiled, and sometimes grew tired of my Christian traditions and Germanic enthusiasm; but, after all, this difference of opinion established for me, in their circle, a plea of interest and favour instead of producing any feeling of illwill or even of indifference.
It was the fall of the apple which gave Newton his theory of gravitation. For Helvetius, see Nouvelle Biographie universelle. Morley, Diderot, ii. 141. Grimm, iv. 80. Morellet, i. 71, 140. Morellet represents himself as a tame cat in Helvetius's house. Compare Locke, i. 261, ii. 97. The doctrine of utility is probably nearly as old as philosophy itself.
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