guide. For the political and economic side detailed treatment is to be found in the works of De Tocqueville and Taine. Having mastered the books named, the student will be in a position to pursue his studies of the Revolution in all directions.

CHAPTER XXII.

CURRENTS OF MODERN THOUGHT.

In the previous chapter it was stated that Naturalism, or, as it has been called, Materialism, the life-system of the eighteenth century, was brought into discredit by the French Revolution. As George Henry Lewes puts it: "The reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century was less a reaction against a doctrine proved to be incompetent than against a doctrine believed to be a source of frightful immorality. The reaction was vigorous, because it was animated by the horror which agitated Europe at the excesses of the French Revolution. Associated in men's minds with the saturnalia of the Terror, the philosophical opinions of Condorcet, Diderot, and Cabanis were held responsible for the crimes of the Convention,

and what might be true in those opinions was flung aside with what was false without discrimination, without analysis, in fierce, impetuous disgust. Every opinion which had what was called a taint of Materialism, or seemed to point in that direction, was denounced as an opinion necessarily leading to the destruction of all religion, morality, and government." Naturally thinkers looked around for a set of first principles which would give repose to the mind of man, and at the same time give stability to the social system. In politics, the writings of Burke, who, with prophetic eye, saw the harvest which was bound to grow out of the intellectual seed so energetically sown by the Materialists, came to the front.

In this country Burke's writings did much to create and sustain the Conservative reaction against the Revolution. In France arose systems of thought whose first principles were directed against the life-system of Naturalism. Against that system the Roman Catholic section, headed by De Maistre; the Royalists, inspired by Chateaubriand; and the Metaphysicians, stimulated

by the Eclectic School of Cousin, united their forces. The Eclectic School was shortlived. Its life-system was a patch-work. Germany supplied a really coherent system of thought by which to confront Materialism. We find Goethe from the poetic side giving voice to the German reaction. Writing of the system of Holbach, he said: "The Materialist theory which reduces all things to matter and motion appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead, that we shuddered at it as a ghost." The Germans - Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel-endeavoured to lift the human mind out of the materialistic slough of despond by constructing a life-system from the spiritual instead of the material side. They attacked Materialism in the citadel. Instead of making Matter they made Spirit the ultimate fact. They interpreted Spirit not in the deistic but in the pantheistic sense. The Germans substituted for Materialism Transcendentalism, with a cosmology and psychology of its own. The Transcendentalists brought order out of confusion by erecting upon the ruins of Materialism a system of thought which embraced

the three great determining factors-God, the Universe, and Man.

The interpreters of the German reaction in this country were Coleridge and Carlyle, whose writings can only be understood when viewed as part and parcel of the great reaction against the doctrines of the Revolution. In one of his essays John Stuart Mill in a nutshell puts the whole matter. "The German - Coleridgian doctrine expresses the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It is ontological because that was experimental, conservative because that was innovative, religious because that was abstract and metaphysical, poetic because that was matterof-fact and prosaic.' In the writings of Wordsworth, Southey, and the Lake school generally, we can distinctly trace the effects of the Revolution. In Scotland the reaction was also felt, and expressed itself in the decline of the Moderate and the rise of the Evangelical school; and in philosophy we can trace the influence of the Revolution in the writings of Sir William Hamilton, with his distinctly anti-materialistic bias. Out of