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When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she advised him that anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr. Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. Tanto nomini nullum par elogium. His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand assured Ticknor that he had never known his equal; Seward calls him "the ablest and most effective statesman engaged in organising and establishing the union"; Macmaster, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the foremost genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that The Federalist was the greatest work known to him, in the application of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with the character of an honest man, was repeated to the letter by Niebuhr. In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the author of the constitution. In the convention he was isolated, and his plan was rejected. In The Federalist, written before he was thirty, he pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He was out of sympathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true representative of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, "If his theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice." The development of the constitution, so far as it continued on his lines, was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late editions of the Commentaries. "The Federalist," says Story, "could do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief-justice has followed them out to their ultimate results and boundaries with a precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical demonstration." Morris, who was as strong as Hamilton on the side of federalism, testifies heavily against him as a leader: "More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He well knew that his favourite form was inadmissible, unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country, could be established in no other way… He trusted, moreover, that in the changes and chances of time we should be involved in some war, which might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. He was of all men the most indiscreet. He knew that a limited monarchy, even if established, could not preserve itself in this country… He never failed, on every occasion, to advocate the excellence of, and avow his attachment to, monarchical government… Thus, meaning very well, he acted very ill, and approached the evils he apprehended by his very solicitude to keep them at a distance." The language of Adams is more severe; but Adams was an enemy. It has been justly said that "he wished good men, as he termed them, to rule; meaning the wealthy, the well-born, the socially eminent." The federalists have suffered somewhat from this imputation; for a prejudice against any group claiming to serve under that flag is among the bequests of the French Revolution. "Les honnêtes gens ont toujours peur: c'est leur nature," is a maxim of Chateaubriand. A man most divergent and unlike him, Menou, had drawn the same conclusion: "En révolution il ne faut jamais se mettre du côté des honnêtes gens: ils sont toujours balayés." And Royer Collard, with the candour one shows in describing friends, said: "C'est le parti des honnêtes gens qui est le moins honnête de tous les partis. Tout le monde, même dans ses erreurs, était honnête à l'assemblée constituante, excepté le côté droit." Hamilton stands higher as a political philosopher than as an American partisan. Europeans are generally liberal for the sake of something that is not liberty, and conservative for an object to be conserved; and in a jungle of other motives besides the reason of state we cannot often eliminate unadulterated or disinterested conservatism. We think of land and capital, tradition and custom, the aristocracy and the services, the crown and the altar. It is the singular superiority of Hamilton that he is really anxious about nothing but the exceeding difficulty of quelling the centrifugal forces, and that no kindred and coequal powers divide his attachment or intercept his view. Therefore he is the most scientific of conservative thinkers, and there is not one in whom the doctrine that prefers the ship to the crew can be so profitably studied.

In his scruple to do justice to conservative doctrine Mr. Bryce extracts a passage from a letter of Canning to Croker which, by itself, does not adequately represent that minister's views. "Am I to understand, then, that you consider the king as completely in the hands of the Tory aristocracy as his father, or rather as George II. was in the hands of the Whigs? If so, George III. reigned, and Mr. Pitt (both father and son) administered the government, in vain. I have a better opinion of the real vigour of the crown when it chooses to put forth its own strength, and I am not without some reliance on the body of the people." The finest mind reared by many generations of English conservatism was not always so faithful to monarchical traditions, and in addressing the incessant polemist of Toryism Canning made himself out a trifle better than he really was. His intercourse with Marcellus in 1823 exhibits a diluted orthodoxy: "Le système britannique n'est que le butin des longues victoires remportées par les sujets contre le monarque. Oubliez-vous que les rois ne doivent pas donner des institutions, mais que les institutions seules doivent donner des rois?.. Connaissez-vous un roi qui mérite d'être libre, dans le sens implicite du mot?.. Et George IV., croyez-vous que je serais son ministre, s'il avait été libre de choisir?.. Quand un roi dénie au peuple les institutions dont le peuple a besoin, quel est le procédé de l'Angleterre? Elle expulse ce roi, et met à sa place un roi d'une famille alliée sans doute, mais qui se trouve ainsi, non plus un fils de la royauté, confiant dans le droit de ses ancêtres, mais le fils des institutions nationales, tirant tous ses droits de cette seule origine… Le gouvernement représentatif est encore bon à une chose que sa majesté a oubliée. Il fait que des ministres essuient sans répliquer les épigrammes d'un roi qui cherche à se venger ainsi de son impuissance."

Mr. Bryce's work has received a hearty welcome in its proper hemisphere, and I know not that any critic has doubted whether the pious founder, with the dogma of unbroken continuity, strikes the just note or covers all the ground. At another angle, the origin of the greatest power and the grandest polity in the annals of mankind emits a different ray. It was a favourite doctrine with Webster and Tocqueville that the beliefs of the pilgrims inspired the Revolution, which others deem a triumph of pelagianism; while J.Q. Adams affirms that "not one of the motives which stimulated the puritans of 1643 had the slightest influence in actuating the confederacy of 1774." The Dutch statesman Hogendorp, returning from the United States in 1784, had the following dialogue with the stadtholder: "La religion, monseigneur, a moins d'influence que jamais sur les esprits… Il y a toute une province de quakers?.. Depuis la révolution il semble que ces sortes de différences s'évanouissent… Les Bostoniens ne sont-ils pas fort dévots?.. Ils l'étaient, monseigneur, mais à lire les descriptions faites il y a vingt ou même dix ans, on ne les reconnaît pas de ce côté-là." It is an old story that the federal constitution, unlike that of Hérault de Séchelles, makes no allusion to the Deity; that there is none in the president's oath; and that in 1796 it was stated officially that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. No three men had more to do with the new order than Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson. Franklin's irreligious tone was such that his manuscripts, like Bentham's, were suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson we are assured that, if not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he hoped that the French arms "would bring at length kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood." If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense described by Guizot: "C'était un siècle ardent et sincère, un siècle plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. Il a eu foi dans la vérité, car il lui a reconnu le droit de régner."

In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does well to load the scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the character which he assiduously lays aside. If he had guarded less against his own historic faculty, and had allowed space to take up neglected threads, he would have had to expose the boundless innovation, the unfathomed gulf produced by American independence, and there would be no opening to back the Jeffersonian shears against the darning-needle of the great chief-justice. My misgiving lies in the line of thought of Riehl and the elder Cherbuliez. The first of those eminent conservatives writes: "Die Extreme, nicht deren Vermittelungen und Abschwächungen, deuten die Zukunft vor." The Genevese has just the same remark: "Les idées n'ont jamais plus de puissance que sous leur forme la plus abstraite. Les idées abstraites ont plus remué le monde, elles ont causé plus de révolutions et laissé plus de traces durables que les idées pratiques." Lassalle says, "Kein Einzelner denkt mit der Consequenz eines Volksgeistes." Schelling may help us over the parting ways: "Der erzeugte Gedanke ist eine unabhängige Macht, für sich fortwirkend, ja, in der menschlichen Seele, so anwachsend, dass er seine eigene Mutter bezwingt und unterwirft." After the philosopher, let us conclude with a divine: "C'est de révolte en révolte, si l'on veut employer ce mot, que les sociétés se perfectionnent, que la civilisation s'établit, que la justice règne, que la vérité fleurit."

The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man's hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore God in the event: "Il faut toujours être content de l'ordre du passé, parce qu'il est conforme à la volonté de Dieu absolue, qu'on connoît par l'évènement." The contrary is the text of Emerson: "Institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born. They are not superior to the citizen. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case. We may make as good; we may make better." More to the present point is the language of Seward: "The rights asserted by our forefathers were not peculiar to themselves, they were the common rights of mankind. The basis of the constitution was laid broader by far than the superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day suffered to be erected. The constitution and laws of the federal government did not practically extend those principles throughout the new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to practical operation constitute the progress which all liberal statesmen desire to promote, and the end of that progress will be complete political equality among ourselves, and the extension and perfection of institutions similar to our own throughout the world." A passage which Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt." Those were the days when a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad and the good, that is, those which exist and those which do not exist; and when Burke, in the fervour of early liberalism, proclaimed that a revolution was the only thing that could do the world any good: "Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished."

XVII
HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND

By Robert Flint⁴⁰²

When Dr. Flint's former work appeared, a critic, who, it is true, was also a rival, objected that it was diffusely written. What then occupied three hundred and thirty pages has now expanded to seven hundred, and suggests a doubt as to the use of criticism. It must at once be said that the increase is nearly all material gain. The author does not cling to his main topic, and, as he insists that the science he is adumbrating flourishes on the study of facts only, and not on speculative ideas, he bestows some needless attention on historians who professed no philosophy, or who, like Daniel and Velly, were not the best of their kind. Here and there, as in the account of Condorcet, there may be an unprofitable or superfluous sentence. But on the whole the enlarged treatment of the philosophy of history in France is accomplished not by expansion, but by solid and essential addition. Many writers are included whom the earlier volume passed over, and Cousin occupies fewer pages now than in 1874, by the aid of smaller type and the omission of a passage injurious to Schelling. Many necessary corrections and improvements have been made, such as the transfer of Ballanche from theocracy to the liberal Catholicism of which he is supposed to be the founder.

Dr. Flint's unchallenged superiority consists alike in his familiarity with obscure, but not irrelevant authors, whom he has brought into line, and in his scrupulous fairness towards all whose attempted systems he has analysed. He is hearty in appreciating talent of every kind, but he is discriminating in his judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting one unduly favoured competitor, who fills two pages with untranslated French, there is little direct quotation. Cournot is one of those who, having been overlooked at first, are here raised to prominence. He is urgently, and justly, recommended to the attention of students. "They will find that every page bears the impress of patient, independent, and sagacious thought. I believe I have not met with a more genuine thinker in the course of my investigations. He was a man of the finest intellectual qualities, of a powerful and absolutely truthful mind." But then we are warned that Cournot never wrote a line for the general reader, and accordingly he is not permitted to speak for himself. Yet it was this thoughtful Frenchman who said: "Aucune idée parmi celles qui se réfèrent à l'ordre des faits naturels ne tient de plus près à la famille des idées religieuses que l'idée du progrès, et n'est plus propre à devenir le principe d'une sorte de foi religieuse pour ceux qui n'en ont pas d'autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la vertu de relever les âmes et les caractères."

The successive theories gain neither in clearness nor in contrast by the order in which they stand. As other countries are reserved for other volumes, Cousin precedes Hegel, who was his master, whilst Quetelet is barely mentioned in his own place, and has to wait for Buckle, if not for Oettingen and Rümelin, before he comes on for discussion. The finer threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The connection between the juste milieu in politics and eclecticism in philosophy was already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler link between the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school – of those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the constitutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbé de Genoude, of the Gazette de France, and opposed by Odilon Barrot, insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy.

It is an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true evolution of philosophy, and that when we have eliminated whatever has been damaged by contemporary criticism or by subsequent advance, and have assimilated all that has survived through the ages, we shall find in our possession not only a record of growth, but the full-grown fruit itself. This is not the way in which Dr. Flint understands the building up of his department of knowledge. Instead of showing how far France has made a way towards the untrodden crest, he describes the many flowery paths, discovered by the French, which lead elsewhere, and I expect that in coming volumes it will appear that Hegel and Buckle, Vico and Ferrari, are scarcely better guides than Laurent or Littré. Fatalism and retribution, race and nationality, the test of success and of duration, heredity and the reign of the invincible dead, the widening circle, the emancipation of the individual, the gradual triumph of the soul over the body, of mind over matter, reason over will, knowledge over ignorance, truth over error, right over might, liberty over authority, the law of progress and perfectibility, the constant intervention of providence, the sovereignty of the developed conscience – neither these nor other alluring theories are accepted as more than illusions or half-truths. Dr. Flint scarcely avails himself of them even for his foundations or his skeleton framework. His critical faculty, stronger than his gift of adaptation, levels obstructions and marks the earth with ruin. He is more anxious to expose the strange unreason of former writers, the inadequacy of their knowledge, their want of aptitude in induction, than their services in storing material for the use of successors. The result is not to be the sifted and verified wisdom of two centuries, but a future system, to be produced when the rest have failed by an exhaustive series of vain experiments. We may regret to abandon many brilliant laws and attractive generalisations that have given light and clearness and simplicity and symmetry to our thought; but it is certain that Dr. Flint is a close and powerful reasoner, equipped with satisfying information, and he establishes his contention that France has not produced a classic philosophy of history, and is still waiting for its Adam Smith or Jacob Grimm.

The kindred topic of development recurs repeatedly, as an important factor in modern science. It is still a confused and unsettled chapter, and in one place Dr. Flint seems to attribute the idea to Bossuet; in another he says that it was scarcely entertained in those days by Protestants, and not at all by Catholics; in a third he implies that its celebrity in the nineteenth century is owing in the first place to Lamennais. The passage, taken from Vinet, in which Bossuet speaks of the development of religion is inaccurately rendered. His words are the same which, on another page, are rightly translated "the course of religion" —la suite de la religion. Indeed, Bossuet was the most powerful adversary the theory ever encountered. It was not so alien to Catholic theology as is here stated, and before the time of Jurieu is more often found among Catholic than Protestant writers. When it was put forward, in guarded, dubious, and evasive terms, by Petavius, the indignation in England was as great as in 1846. The work which contained it, the most learned that Christian theology had then produced, could not be reprinted over here, lest it should supply the Socinians with inconvenient texts. Nelson hints that the great Jesuit may have been a secret Arian, and Bull stamped upon his theory amid the grateful applause of Bossuet and his friends. Petavius was not an innovator, for the idea had long found a home among the Franciscan masters: "Proficit fides secundum statum communem, quia secundum profectum temporum efficiebantur homines magis idonei ad percipienda et intelligenda sacramenta fidei. – Sunt multae conclusiones necessario inclusae in articulis creditis, sed antequam sunt per Ecclesiam declaratae et explicatae non oportet quemcumque eas credere. Oportet tamen circa eas sobrie opinari, ut scilicet homo sit paratus eas tenere pro tempore, pro quo veritas fuerit declarata." Cardinal Duperron said nearly the same thing as Petavius a generation before him: "L'Arien trouvera dans sainct Irénée, Tertullien et autres qui nous sont restez en petit nombre de ces siècles-là, que le Fils est l'instrument du Père, que le Père a commandé au Fils lors qu'il a esté question de la création des choses, que le Père et le Fils sont aliud et aliud; choses que qui tiendroit aujourd'huy, que le langage de l'Eglise est plus examiné, seroit estimé pour Arien luy-mesme." All this does not serve to supply the pedigree which Newman found it so difficult to trace. Development, in those days, was an expedient, an hypothesis, and not even the thing so dear to the Oxford probabilitarians, a working hypothesis. It was not more substantial than the gleam in Robinson's farewell to the pilgrims: "I am very confident that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word." The reason why it possessed no scientific basis is explained by Duchesne: "Ce n'est guère avant la seconde moitié du xviie siècle qu'il devint impossible de soutenir l'authenticité des fausses décrétales, des constitutions apostoliques, des 'Récognitions Clémentines,' du faux Ignace, du pseudo-Dionys et de l'immense fatras d'œuvres anonymes ou pseudonymes qui grossissait souvent du tiers ou de la moitié l'héritage littéraire des auteurs les plus considérables. Qui aurait pu même songer à un développement dogmatique?" That it was little understood, and lightly and loosely employed, is proved by Bossuet himself, who alludes to it in one passage as if he did not know that it was the subversion of his theology: "Quamvis ecclesia omnem veritatem funditus norit, ex haeresibus tamen discit, ut aiebat magni nominis Vincentius Lirinensis, aptius, distinctius, clariusque eandem exponere."

The account of Lamennais suffers from the defect of mixing him up too much with his early friends. No doubt he owed to them the theory that carried him through his career, for it may be found in Bonald, and also in De Maistre, though not, perhaps, in the volumes he had already published. It was less original than he at first imagined, for the English divines commonly held it from the seventeenth century, and its dirge was sung only the other day by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.⁴⁰³ A Scottish professor would even be justified in claiming it for Reid. But of course it was Lamennais who gave it most importance, in his programme and in his life. And his theory of the common sense, the theory that we can be certain of truth only by the agreement of mankind, though vigorously applied to sustain authority in State and Church, gravitated towards multitudinism, and marked him off from his associates. When he said quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, he was not thinking of the Christian Church, but of Christianity as old as the creation; and the development he meant led up to the Bible, and ended at the New Testament instead of beginning there. That is the theory which he made so famous, which founded his fame and governed his fate, and to which Dr. Flint's words apply when he speaks of celebrity. In that sense it is a mistake to connect Lamennais with Möhler and Newman; and I do not believe that he anticipated their teaching, in spite of one or two passages which do not, on the face of them, bear date B.C., and may, no doubt, be quoted for the opposite opinion.

In the same group Dr. Flint represents De Maistre as the teacher of Savigny, and asserts that there could never be a doubt as to the liberalism of Chateaubriand. There was none after his expulsion from office; but there was much reason for doubting in 1815, when he entreated the king to set bounds to his mercy; in 1819, when he was contributing to the Conservateur; and in 1823, when he executed the mandate of the absolute monarchs against the Spanish constitution. His zeal for legitimacy was at all times qualified with liberal elements, but they never became consistent or acquired the mastery until 1824. De Maistre and Savigny covered the same ground at one point; they both subjected the future to the past. This could serve as an argument for absolutism and theocracy, and on that account was lovely in the eyes of De Maistre. If it had been an argument the other way he would have cast it off. Savigny had no such ulterior purpose. His doctrine, that the living are not their own masters, could serve either cause. He rejected a mechanical fixity, and held that whatever has been made by process of growth shall continue to grow and suffer modification. His theory of continuity has this significance in political science, that it supplied a basis for conservatism apart from absolutism and compatible with freedom. And, as he believed that law depends on national tradition and character, he became indirectly and through friends a founder of the theory of nationality.

The one writer whom Dr. Flint refuses to criticise, because he too nearly agrees with him, is Renouvier. Taking this avowal in conjunction with two or three indiscretions on other pages, we can make a guess, not at the system itself, which is to console us for so much deviation, but at its tendency and spirit The fundamental article is belief in divine government. As Kant beheld God in the firmament of heaven, so too we can see him in history on earth. Unless a man is determined to be an atheist, he must acknowledge that the experience of mankind is a decisive proof in favour of religion. As providence is not absolute, but reigns over men destined to freedom, its method is manifested in the law of progress. Here, however, Dr. Flint, in his agreement with Renouvier, is not eager to fight for his cause, and speaks with a less jubilant certitude. He is able to conceive that providence may attain its end without the condition of progress, that the divine scheme would not be frustrated if the world, governed by omnipotent wisdom, became steadily worse. Assuming progress as a fact, if not a law, there comes the question wherein it consists, how it is measured, where is its goal. Not religion, for the Middle Ages are an epoch of decline. Catholicism has since lost so much ground as to nullify the theories of Bossuet; whilst Protestantism never succeeded in France, either after the Reformation, when it ought to have prevailed, nor after the Revolution, when it ought not. The failure to establish the Protestant Church on the ruins of the old régime, to which Quinet attributes the breakdown of the Revolution, and which Napoleon regretted almost in the era of his concordat, is explained by Mr. Flint on the ground that Protestants were in a minority. But so they were in and after the wars of religion; and it is not apparent why a philosopher who does not prefer orthodoxy to liberty should complain that they achieved nothing better than toleration. He disproves Bossuet's view by that process of deliverance from the Church which is the note of recent centuries, and from which there is no going back. On the future I will not enlarge, because I am writing at present in the Historical, not the Prophetical, Review. But some things were not so clear in France in 1679 as they are now at Edinburgh. The predominance of Protestant power was not foreseen, except by those who disputed whether Rome would perish in 1710 or about 1720. The destined power of science to act upon religion had not been proved by Newton or Simon. No man was able to forecast the future experience of America, or to be sure that observations made under the reign of authority would be confirmed by the reign of freedom.