, and at least having the residuary wisdom of tradition
together with the additional force of his common sense. Thus, on the
eve of giving the ignorant man a power equal to that of the
intelligent one, and of handing over the supreme decision in the vital
concerns of a country to unsafeguarded majorities less qualified for
the task than ancient oligarchy or autocracy. But he had nothing of
worth to suggest, no alternative save the return to abuses of the
grossest kind which experience had proved to lead to revolution.

His ponderous declaration: "I write by the light of two eternal
truths, religion and the monarchy," was a sort of cheap-jack
recommendation of the so-called philosophy in his _Comedie Humaine_.
His Catholic orthodoxy, if orthodoxy it were, savoured more of
politics than religion. He did not wish the old ecclesiastical
organization and faith of France to be changed, because he saw in it a
useful police agency for restraining the masses. As for his Royalism,
which had a smack of Frondism in it, he stuck to it because it
accorded with his conservative, eclectic tastes, and not because he
had worked it out as the best theory of government. Such dissertations
as appear in his writings, on either the one or the other subject,
have nothing more original about them than can be found in the most
ordinary election speech or pulpit discourse.

And in the realm of pure speculative thought he was not great. Beyond
the limits of the visible, his intuition failed him; so that he
floundered helplessly when not upheld by the doctrines of others,
which, since he did not understand them, he adapted to his purpose but
awkwardly. Whether there were latent faculties in him that might have
developed with training, it is impossible to affirm or deny; however,
we may be forgiven the doubt. From a mind so forceful, the native
perception, though uncultured, should have issued in something better
than _Lambert_ or _Seraphita_. Still, there is this to be said, that a
man whose eyes were so constantly bent on facts, whose gaze was always
spying out details which escaped the common observation, was embracing
a plane parallel, if inferior to that which was covered by a Plato.

The title of the author of the _Comedy_ to be called a philosopher can
be defended only on the ground of his adding a new domain to the rule
of science. He was not the discoverer of the law of cause and effect.
Nor was he the one in his own country who did the m