iousness of a direct and immediate kind, which is the supreme and
reconciling judge of the reports alike of the senses, of history, of
divine revelation.[1] Each of these schools had many exponents. The
three most conspicuous champions of revived Catholicism were De Maistre,
De Bonald, and Chateaubriand. The last of them, the author of the _Genie
du Christianisme_, was effective in France because he is so deeply
sentimental, but he was too little trained in speculation, and too
little equipped with knowledge, to be fairly taken as the best
intellectual representative of their way of thinking. De Bonald was of
much heavier calibre. He really thought, while Chateaubriand only felt,
and the _Legislation Primitive_ and the _Pensees sur Divers Sujets_
contain much that an enemy of the school will find it worth while to
read, in spite of an artificial, and, if a foreigner may judge, a
detestable style.

De Maistre was the greatest of the three, and deserves better than
either of the others to stand as the type of the school for many
reasons. His style is so marvellously lucid, that, notwithstanding the
mystical, or, as he said, the illuminist side of his mind, we can never
be in much doubt about his meaning, which is not by any means the case
with Bonald. To say nothing of his immensely superior natural capacity,
De Maistre's extensive reading in the literature of his foes was a
source of strength, which might indeed have been thought indispensable,
if only other persons had not attacked the same people as he did,
without knowing much or anything at all at first-hand about them. Then
he goes over the whole field of allied subjects, which we have a right
to expect to have handled by anybody with a systematic view of the
origin of knowledge, the meaning of ethics, the elements of social order
and progressiveness, the government and scheme of the universe. And
above all, his writings are penetrated with the air of reality and life,
which comes of actual participation in the affairs of that world with
which social philosophers have to deal. Lamennais had in many respects a
finer mind than De Maistre, but the conclusions in which he was finally
landed, no less than his liberal aims, prevent him from being an example
of the truly Catholic reaction. He obviously represented the Revolution,
or the critical spirit, within the Catholic limits, while De Maistre's
ruling idea was, in his own trenchant phrase, '_absolument tuer
l'esprit d