f so much natural acuteness as De Maistre.
Persons who have accustomed themselves to ascertained methods of proof,
are apt to look on a man who vows that if a thing has been declared
true by some authority whom he respects, then that constitutes proof to
him, as either the victim of a preposterous and barely credible
infatuation, or else as a flat impostor. Yet De Maistre was no ignorant
monk. He had no selfish or official interest in taking away the
keys of knowledge, entering not in himself, and them that would
enter in hindering. The true reasons for his detestation of the
eighteenth-century philosophers, science, and literature, are simple
enough. Like every wise man, he felt that the end of all philosophy and
science is emphatically social, the construction and maintenance and
improvement of a fabric under which the communities of men may find
shelter, and may secure all the conditions for living their lives with
dignity and service. Then he held that no truth can be harmful to
society. If he found any system of opinions, any given attitude of the
mind, injurious to tranquillity and the public order, he instantly
concluded that, however plausible they might seem when tested by logic
and demonstration, they were fundamentally untrue and deceptive. What is
logic compared with eternal salvation in the next world, and the
practice of virtue in this? The recommendation of such a mind as De
Maistre's is the intensity of its appreciation of order and social
happiness. The obvious weakness of such a mind, and the curse inherent
in its influence, is that it overlooks the prime condition of all; that
social order can never be established on a durable basis so long as the
discoveries of scientific truth in all its departments are suppressed,
or incorrectly appreciated, or socially misapplied. De Maistre did not
perceive that the cause which he supported was no longer the cause of
peace and tranquillity and right living, but was in a state of absolute
and final decomposition, and therefore was the cause of disorder and
blind wrong living. Of this we shall now see more.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg_ (8th ed. 1862), vol. i. pp. 238-243.

[4] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, 6ieme entretien_, i. 397-442.

[5] _Ib._ (8th ed. 1862) vol. i. p. 403.

[6] _Soirees_, i. 76

[7] De Maistre found a curiously characteristic kind of support for this
view in the fact that evils are called _fleaux_: flails are things to