great success in mechanical natural science, with which Romanticism
will least of all be reproached.

The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, as specially represented
for France by Descartes, had materialism for its antagonist from its
hour of birth. In person this antagonist confronted Descartes in the
shape of Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and
English materialism always remain in close relationship with
Democritus and Epicurus.

Cartesian metaphysics found another antagonist in the English
materialist Hobbes. Long after their death, Gassendi and Hobbes
triumphed over their opponent at the moment when the former reigned in
all the schools of France as the official power.

Voltaire once remarked that the indifference of Frenchmen in the
eighteenth century towards Jesuitical and Jansenist quarrels was
brought about less by philosophy than by Law's financial speculations.
Thus the overthrow of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century can
be explained from the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century
only in so far as this theoretical movement is itself explicable by
the practical shape of the French life of that time. This life was
directed to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly
interests, to the secular world. It was inevitable that
anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories should
correspond to its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, its
materialistic practice. In practice metaphysics had lost all credit.
Here we have only to indicate briefly the course of the theoretical
movement.

In the seventeenth century metaphysics had already been provided with
a positive, a profane content (_pace_ Descartes, Leibnitz etc.). It
made discoveries in mathematics, physics, and other definite sciences
which appeared to belong to it, but by the beginning of the eighteenth
century this semblance had been destroyed. The positive sciences had
broken away from it and mapped out their own territory. The whole
metaphysical realm consisted in nothing more than creatures of fancy
and heavenly things at the precise time when real beings and earthly
things were beginning to concentrate all interest upon themselves.
Metaphysics had become stale. Helvetius and Condillac were born in the
same year that Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French
metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died.

The man who theoretically destroyed the credit of the metaphysics of
t