ntaneous generation as did the ancients, when
they believed that bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the
first place, the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true
swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs,
as Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each sprang
from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it
was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from
it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the decay of the Ancien
Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous
themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and
organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each
of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God."
All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any
man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so,
like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward
toward the brute.

Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of
thought, an originality, a resistance to circumstances, an indignant
defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had
circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind. Had that
latter been the case, the downward progress of the Ancien Regime would
have been irremediable. Each generation, conformed more and more to the
element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to
evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at
any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have
issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic
struggle for revenge and bread.

There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by
circumstances. Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state;
some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but
in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new
forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain),
but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and
original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with
power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord
and Giver of Life.

Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in E