p in the one country, and grew to
overshadow the earth in the other? Because, he answers, the new seed
fell upon ground that was suited to it, the home of the classic
spirit, the country of _raison raisonnante_. Compare with this
merely literary solution the answer given to the same question by De
Tocqueville:--'It was no accident that the philosophers of the
eighteenth century generally conceived notions so opposed to those
which still served as the base of the society of their time; _these
ideas had actually been suggested to them by the very sight of that
society, which they had ever before their eyes_' (_Ancien Regime_,
206). This is the exact truth and the whole truth. The greatest
enterprise achieved by the men of letters in the period of
intellectual preparation was the Encyclopaedia; and I have elsewhere
tried to present what seemed to be ample evidence that the spirit
and aim of that great undertaking were social, and that its
conductors, while delivering their testimony in favour of the
experiential conception of life in all its aspects, and while
reproducing triumphantly the most recent acquisitions of science,
had still the keenest and most direct eye for the abuses and
injustice, the waste and disorder, of the social institutions around
them. The answer, then, which we should venture to give to M.
Taine's question would be much simpler than his. The philosophy of
the eighteenth century fared differently in England and in France,
because its ideas did not fit in with the economic and political
conditions of the one, while, on the contrary, they were actively
warmed and fostered by those of the other. It was not a literary
aptitude in the nation for _raison raisonnante_, which developed the
political theories of Rousseau, the moral and psychological theories
of Diderot, the anti-ecclesiastical theories of Voltaire and
Holbach. It was the profound disorganisation of institutions that
suggested and stimulated the speculative agitation. 'The nation,'
wrote the wise and far-seeing Turgot, 'has no constitution; it is a
society composed of different orders ill assorted, and of a people
whose members have few social bonds with one another; where
consequently scarcely any one is occupied with anything beyond his
private interest exclusively,' and so forth (_[OE]uv_. ii. 504). Any
student, uncommitted to a theory, who examines in close detail the
wise aims and just and conservative methods of Turgot, and the
circumst