were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as
opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition
only half believed, or pretended to be believed. No one can deny that
their theories were too general and abstract; but then they were theories
as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die."

Theories--principles--by them if men do not live, by them men are, at
least, stirred into life, at the sight of something more noble than
themselves. Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as
that which Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul
self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.

For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical
considerations, not by self-interest, not by compromises; but by theories
and principles, and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural,
and literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they be according to
reason or not, are so little according to logic--that is, to speakable
reason--that they cannot be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or
in masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite
incompetent, often quite irrelevant; but which they have caught from each
other, as they catch fever or small-pox; as unconsciously, and yet as
practically and potently; just as the nineteenth century has caught from
the philosophers of the eighteenth most practical rules of conduct,
without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.

And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it
has learnt, and that a most practical one--to appeal in all cases, as
much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least,
the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of
reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to
unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of
them all was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and
elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the
complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their
time." They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their method.
They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not
physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which
concern a stone or a fungus. They mistook for merely complicated