eed the story. You cannot effectively reproduce the true sense and
significance of such an epoch as the eighteenth century in France,
without telling us, however barely, the tale, for example, of the
long battle of the ecclesiastical factions, and the yet more
important series of battles between the judiciary and the crown. If
M. Taine's book were a piece of abstract social analysis, the above
remark would not be true. But it is a study of the concrete facts of
French life and society, and to make such a study effective, the
element of the chronicle, as in Lacretelle or Jobez, cannot rightly
be dispensed with.

* * * * *

Let us proceed to the chief thesis of the book. The new formula in
which M. Taine describes the source of all the mischiefs of the
revolutionary doctrine is this. 'When we see a man,' he says, 'who
is rather weak in constitution, but apparently sound and of peaceful
habits, drink eagerly of a new liquor, then suddenly fall to the
ground, foaming at the mouth, delirious and convulsed, we have no
hesitation in supposing that in the pleasant draught there was some
dangerous ingredient; but we need a delicate analysis in order to
decompose and isolate the poison. There is one in the philosophy of
the eighteenth century, as curious as it was potent: for not only is
it the product of a long historic elaboration, the final and
condensed extract in which the whole thought of the century ends;
but more than that, its two principal elements are peculiar in this,
and when separated they are each of them salutary, yet in
combination they produce a poisonous compound.' These two
ingredients are, first, the great and important acquisitions of the
eighteenth century in the domain of physical science; second, the
fixed classic form of the French intelligence. 'It is the classic
spirit which, being applied to the scientific acquisitions of the
time, produced the philosophy of the century and the doctrines of
the Revolution.' This classic spirit has in its literary form one or
two well-known marks. It leads, for instance, to the fastidious
exclusion of particulars, whether in phrases, objects, or traits of
character, and substitutes for them the general, the vague, the
typic. Systematic arrangement orders the whole structure and
composition from the period to the paragraph, from the paragraph to
the structural series of paragraphs; it dictates the style as it has
fixed the syntax. Its g