the reasoning type of mind and thought
which reigned throughout the English literature; but the corollaries from
it which produced harm were no part of the original system.(504)
Condillac, desiring to carry out the analysis of the origin of knowledge,
lost sight of the intellectual element in Locke's account of the process
of reflection; denied the existence of innate faculties as well as innate
ideas; and attempted to show that man's mind is so passive, so dependent
on the evidence of the senses for the material of its thoughts, and on
language for the power to combine them, that its very faculties are
transformed sensations.(505) From these premises it was not hard for his
followers to draw the inferences of materialism(506) in philosophy,
selfishness in morals, and an entire denial of those religious truths
which cannot be proved by sensuous evidence. This philosophy began to
leaven the mind of France, and was accepted by nearly the whole of French
unbelievers.

Such was the intellectual state of France in reference to the standard of
appeal contemporaneously with the political and ecclesiastical condition
before described. In the state and church all was authority; all was of
the past; in the world of literature and philosophy all was criticism,
activity, hope in the future. Into a soil thus prepared the seeds of
unbelief on the subject of religion were introduced. We cannot deny that
they were imported mainly from England. Doubt had indeed not been wholly
wanting in France. In the preceding centuries Montaigne(507) and
Charron,(508) and, at the commencement of the one of which we speak,
Bayle(509) and Fontenelle,(510) were probably harassed with disbelief, and
their influence was certainly productive of doubt. And free thought, in
the form of literary criticism of the scriptures, had brought down the
denunciation of the French church on Richard Simon.(511) But undoubtedly
the direct parent of the French unbelief was English deism.(512) In no age
of French history has English literature possessed so powerful an
influence.(513) England had recently achieved those liberties of which
France felt the need. It had safely outlived civil war and revolution, and
had established constitutional liberty and religious toleration. In
England the victims of the French oppression found shelter. Being itself
free, it became the refuge for the exile, the shelter for the oppressed.
It thus became the object of study to the politician