ced he
published some studies in ancient history and many miscellaneous works,
including a project of a universal language. Volney was, as has been
said, the last of the _philosophes_, exhibiting, long after a new order
of thought had set in, their acute but negative and one-sided criticism,
their sterile contempt of Christianity and religion generally, their
somewhat theoretic acceptance of generalisations on philosophy and
history, and of large plans for dealing with politics and ethics. As a
traveller his observation is accurate and his expression vivid; as a
philosophical historian his acuteness is perhaps not sufficiently
accompanied by real breadth of view.

[Sidenote: La Mettrie]

[Sidenote: Helvetius]

Between these philosophers, in the local and temporary sense of the
word, who dealt only with what would now be called the sociological side
of philosophy in its bearings on politics, religion, ethics, and
economics, and the strictly philosophical school of Condillac and his
followers, a small but very influential sect of materialists, who were
yet not purely philosophical materialists, has to be considered. Three
members of this school have importance in literature--La Mettrie,
Helvetius, and Holbach. La Mettrie was a native of Britanny: he entered
the medical service of the French army, acquired a speedy reputation for
heterodoxy and disorderly living, and fled for shelter to the general
patron of heterodox Frenchmen, Frederick of Prussia; at whose court he
died, at a comparatively early age, it is said in consequence of a
practical joke. La Mettrie's chief work is a paradoxical exercise in
materialist physics called _L'Homme-Machine_, in which he endeavours to
prove the purely automatic working of the human frame, and the absence
of any mind in the spiritualist sense. This he followed by a similar but
less original work, called _L'Homme-Plante_, and by some other minor
publications. La Mettrie was a very unequal thinker and writer, but he
has, as Voltaire (who disliked him) expressed it, _traits de flamme_
both in thought and style. Claude Adrian Helvetius was of Swiss descent,
and of ample fortune. Born in 1715, he was appointed to the high post of
Farmer-General when he was little more than twenty-three; but he did not
hold this appointment very long, and became Chamberlain to the Queen. He
was very popular in society, and was of a benevolent and philanthropic
disposition, though he seems to have got into