asping, greedy quality for which we have paid
over and over again in the disappointments and disillusionments of an
age, which, supposing itself to have discovered the true secret of
well-being, found too much of its seeming happiness only Dead Sea fruit.

[Footnote 61: Hibben, "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment," p. 253.]

_They Bear a Bitter Fruit: the Reactions Against Them_

Deism in its reaction against Religion as merely revelation and in its
endeavour to find a rational basis for faith set God apart from His
world, detached, unheeding and offering no real recourse to a travailing
humanity between whom and Himself it built a rigid fabric of impersonal
law. The Individualism of the eighteenth century was partly a reaction
against old despotisms of Church and State--and a Declaration of
Independence. It was in part a pride of accomplishment and a new
affirmation of the self-sufficiency of the questing reason. There was in
it also a sound recognition of the worth of personality of which the
world then stood in need and which has since supplied a foundation for a
saving passion for education and human well-being. But Individualism as
practically applied by the first three-quarters of the nineteenth
century--unexpectedly reinforced as it was by aspects of
Darwinism--stressed the right of the strong and the doom of the weak. It
made competition the law of economic development, the survival of the
fittest the goal of a life of struggle.

Consciously or unconsciously the politics, industry and religion of the
nineteenth century were greatly influenced by these outstanding
conceptions. No need to say how utterly they have broken down. They have
made for the deepening strife of classes and of nations, they have
essentially defeated the bright promise of a time which seemed to have
more to hope for than almost any other great period of history.

And yet they were never unchallenged. They were challenged by the
essential spirit of Christianity; they were challenged by the poets who
found that they could shape no songs out of such stuff as this; they
were challenged by philosophers who sought to build for themselves and
for us a world more free and true; they were challenged by a group of
great novelists who created out of the wealth of their imagination
characters and situations in which love and human worth had their way
in spite of a thousand obstacles. They were challenged by prophets of a
better world, the Ruskins