fied in saying that energetic faith in possibilities of social
progress has been first reached through the philosophy of sensation and
experience.

In describing the encyclopaedic movement as being, among other things,
the development of political interest under the presiding influence of a
humanistic philosophy, we are using the name of politics in its widest
sense. The economic conditions of a country, and the administration of
its laws, are far more vitally related to its well-being than the form
of its government. The form of government is indeed a question of the
first importance, but then this is owing in a paramount degree to the
influence which it may have upon the other two sets of elements in the
national life. Form of government is like the fashion of a man's
clothes; it may fret or may comfort him, may be imposing or mean, may
react upon his spirits to elate or depress them. In either case it is
less intimately related to his welfare than the state of his blood and
tissues. In saying, then, that the Encyclopaedists began a political
work, what is meant is that they drew into the light of new ideas,
groups of institutions, usages, and arrangements which affected the real
well-being and happiness of France, as closely as nutrition affected the
health and strength of an individual Frenchman. It was the
Encyclopaedists who first stirred opinion in France against the
iniquities of colonial tyranny and the abominations of the slave trade.
They demonstrated the folly and wastefulness and cruelty of a fiscal
system that was eating the life out of the land. They protested in
season and out of season against arrangements which made the
administration of justice a matter of sale and purchase. They lifted up
a strong voice against the atrocious barbarities of an antiquated penal
code. It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of
letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis XV., nor the churchmen
singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society,
the honour that is owed to productive industry. They were vehement for
the glories of peace, and passionate against the brazen glories of
war.[160]

We are not to suppose that the Encyclopaedia was the originating organ
of either new methods or new social ideas. The exalted and peculiarly
modern views about peace, for instance, were plainly inspired from the
writings of the Abbe Saint Pierre (1658-1743)--one of the most original
spirits