r faculty to
the forces within our control, and to withdraw it from vain industry
about forces--if they be forces--which are beyond our control and beyond
our apprehension. Thus man becomes the centre of the world to himself,
nature his servant and minister, human society the field of his
interests and his exertions. The sensational psychology, again, whether
scientifically defensible or not, clearly tends to heighten our idea of
the power of education and institutions upon character. The more vividly
we realise the share of external impressions in making men what they
are, the more ready we shall be to concern ourselves with external
conditions and their improvement. The introduction of the positive
spirit into the observation of the facts of society was not to be
expected until the Cartesian philosophy, with its reliance on
inexplicable intuitions and its exaggeration of the method of
hypothesis, had been laid aside.

Diderot struck a key-note of difference between the old Catholic spirit
and the new social spirit, between quietist superstition and energetic
science, in the casual sentence in his article on alms-houses and
hospitals: "_It would be far more important to work at the prevention of
misery, than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable_."

It is very easy to show that the Encyclopaedists had not established an
impregnable scientific basis for their philosophy. Anybody can now see
that their metaphysic and psychology were imperfectly thought out. The
important thing is that their metaphysic and psychology were calculated,
notwithstanding all their superficialities, to inspire an energetic
social spirit, because they were pregnant with humanistic sentiment. To
represent the Encyclopaedia as the gospel of negation and denial is to
omit four-fifths of its contents. Men may certainly, if they please,
describe it as merely negative work, for example, to denounce such
institutions as examination and punishment by Torture (See _Question,
Peine_), but if so, what gospel of affirmation can bring better
blessings?[159] If the metaphysic of these writers had been a
thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that, so long
as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on
which the progress and even the very life of the nation depended? It
would be obviously unfair to say that reasoned interest in social
improvement is incompatible with a spiritualistic doctrine, but we are
justi