of experience, to measure them by the principle of
relativity, must be fatal in the minds of such persons as already accept
experience as the only right test in such a matter. It is exactly as if
the action of an Italian opera should be criticised in the light of the
conditions of real life: the whole performance must in an instant figure
as an absurdity. No partisan of the lyric drama would consent to have it
so judged, and the philosophic partisans of theology would perhaps have
been wiser to keep clear of pretensions to _prove_ their master thesis.
They might have been content to keep it as an emotional creation, an
imaginative hypothesis, a noble simplification of the chimeras of the
primitive consciousness of the race.

As it was, neither side could be convinced by the other, for they had no
common criterion. They had hardly even a common language. The only
effect of Holbach's blows was to persuade the bystanders who thronged
round the lists in that eager time, that the so-called proofs with which
the high philosophic names were associated, were only proofs to those
who accepted a way of thinking which it was the very characteristic of
that age decisively to reject. The controversial force of this part of
the attack simply lay in the piercing thoroughness with which the
irreconcilable discrepancies between the seventeenth century notion of
demonstration, and that notion in the eighteenth, were forced upon the
reader's attention.

One other remark may be made. Whatever we may think of the success of
the author's assault on the theistic hypothesis of the universe, it is
impossible to deny that he at least succeeds in repelling the various
assaults levelled on what is vulgarly termed atheism. He rightly urges
the unreasonableness of taxing those who have formed to themselves
intelligible notions of the moving power of the universe, with denying
the existence of such a power; the absurdity of charging the very men
who found everything that comes to pass in the world on fixed and
constant laws, with attributing everything to chance. If by Atheist, he
says, you mean a man who would deny the existence of a force inherent in
matter, and without which you cannot conceive nature, and if to this
moving force you give the name of God, then an Atheist would be a
madman. Holbach then describes the sense in which Atheists both exist
and, as he thinks, may well justify their existence. Their qualities are
as follows: To be guide