of remarkable vigour
alternating with long and dreary tracts of inconclusive and monotonous
declamation. It appeared under the name of a dead man, Mirabaud, a
person of some slight and chiefly official name in science and letters.
It is, however, believed, if not certainly known, to be the work of the
Baron d'Holbach (who unquestionably wrote various other books of a
similar tendency), with the assistance of divers of his friends, and
especially of Diderot. The _Systeme_ is a very singular production,
animated by a kind of fanatical, and in parts almost poetical aspiration
after the annihilation of all supernatural belief, which is hardly to be
found elsewhere except in Lucretius. It had great influence, though
that influence was one of repulsion as well as of conversion, and it may
be said to be, up to the present day, the furthest step taken in the
direction of philosophical as opposed to political Nihilism. It should,
however, be observed that in parts there is a strong political tinge
observable in it.

[Sidenote: Condillac.]

In all this century of so-called philosophy, France possessed hardly
more than one really eminent and considerable metaphysician. This was
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, brother of the Abbe de Mably, who was born
in 1715, and died in 1780. Condillac himself was an abbe, and possessing
a sufficient benefice, he lived for the most part quietly upon it, and
took no part in the political, or even the literary life of the times.
In 1746 he published his _Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances
Humaines_; in 1749 his _Traite des Systemes_, a work critical rather
than constructive; and in 1754 the _Traite des Sensations_, his
principal work, which completes his theory. The influence of Locke was
the most powerful single influence in the _philosophe_ movement of
France, and Condillac took up Locke's work at exactly the point where
his master had faltered. He set to work to show with great plausibility
that, according to Lockeian principles, the addition of ideas of
reflection to ideas of sensation is unsustainable, and that all ideas
without exception are merely transformed sensations. One of the
illustrations which he used to support his views, that of a statue
supposed to be endowed with a single sense, and successively developing
first the others, and then the powers usually classed as reflection, is
famous in the history of philosophy. It concerns us only as giving an
instance of the method of Condi