infinite complexity of Nature, we must combine them if we would gain an outlook, however inadequate, over Nature as a whole.

They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

Systems are fallacious; it is only by a free employment of sophisms to conceal their deficiencies that systems are formed and impose themselves upon us. No philosophy is more than a way of looking at things, a variable formula expressing certain invariable phenomena; no dogma, no religious conception, represents its object as it is; the nearest the truth are but 'broken lights' of the Infinite, and It is more than they.' The heart, then, rightly interrogated, has its standing in these difficult matters as well as the understanding; it may be, indeed, that when the two conflict we do well to trust the former rather than the latter, and-as the poet bids us

feel, that we may know.

Les vérités découvertes par l'intelligence demeurent stériles. Le cœur est seul capable de féconder les rêves. Il verse la vie dans tout ce qu'il aime. C'est par le sentiment que les semences du bien sont jetées sur le monde. La raison n'a point tant de vertu. . . . Il faut, pour servir les hommes, rejeter toute raison, comme un bagage embarrassant, et s'élever sur les ailes de l'enthousiasme. Si l'on raisonne, on ne s'envolera jamais.1

1 Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard, p. 288.

VII. ÉMILE FAGUET

THE Somewhat cynical saying of Ecclesiastes that there is no new thing under the sun appears, according to the point of view from which it is regarded, either a truism or an untruth the former, if we take it to mean that there is no such thing as an absolutely new departure in experience; the latter, if it be construed into a denial of the fact that experience is for ever presenting itself to us under new forms. Taken, however, in an intermediate sense, it contains a truth: the ideas which form the content of consciousness, though capable of entering into endless combinations, are limited in number. As from the few notes of the musical scale the composer builds up the complex harmony of the fugue or the symphony, so out of a few elementary perceptions and feelings the statesman, the poet, the philosopher construct their masterpieces, each in his respective kingdom of fact, fancy, and thought. It is not easy to resolve these, in the completed forms in which they come before us, into their elements: the original matter is disguised or transformed in the using-the brick faced with marble, the gases cooled into consistency, the separate fused into the whole. And this difficulty is greater or less according to the complexity of the structure: it is easier, for instance, to analyse American institutions than European; the centuries of growth which lie behind the latter have left their history entangled and their origins obscure. In the case of our own country, our national character aggravates the task Judgment rather than intelligence is the note of the English mind. We distrust ideas as such; they must come to us in the garb of custom, or even of prejudice : it is the reason latent in unreason that commends itself to us; precedent rather than logic is our guide. The Latin

races are differently constituted: ideas possess them; the fallacy of logic, than which no fallacy is greater or more mischievous, besets their way. For this very reason, however, it is easier to trace the development of thought among them than among ourselves it moves unchecked from premiss to inference and from syllogism to syllogism, ignoring the difference between pure and applied science, careless of the gulf that separates formula from fact. No English writers are so consequent, in the literal sense of the word, as Rousseau, as De Maistre, as Comte. Happily for England, we may believe; for, from the practical point of view, our illogicalness has been our salvation: the more rigorously men reason from necessarily imperfect premisses the wider of the truth are the conclusions at which they arrive. But the logic of French thought, fallacious in itself, facilitates the inquiries of the historian of ideas: nowhere do these command such an assent, gain such a following, or stand out in such strong relief. The German mind is more profound, the English sounder, but in intelligence pure and simple the French is superior to either. It is the soil of all others in which ideas flourish. If we would watch their growth, follow their development, and inspect their content, we shall do so to the best advantage here.

Nor would it be easy to find a more competent guide than M. Faguet he is recommended by his qualities, and not disqualified by their accompanying defects. It might, perhaps, be maintained without paradox that these constitute an additional recommendation. There are two M. Faguets indeed, an impersonal and a personal, an exponent and a controversialist: but in both the temperament which has been described as French is dominant, both are possessed by, rather than possess, ideas. Of both the criticism of M. Pellissier, trop cérébral pour être artiste,'1 holds good: M. Faguet has more intelligence than sensibility; neither humour, nor sympathy, nor lightness of touch is his. His thinking is as nearly as possible pure brain-work; his one aim is to render the idea to the life. Hence a certain indifference to completeness and consistency, 1 Le Mouvement littéraire contemporain, p. 245.

because these qualities, as he conceives them, are incompatible with perfect accuracy of description. System—' une idée chez ceux qui ne sont pas très capables d'en avoir plusieurs, ou une passion chez ceux qui sont incapables de penser autre chose que ce qu'ils sentent '-is too limited and too individual for his austerely objective temper. A great writer, he holds-and perhaps he is himself an example of it is not one man but many men. No one formula expresses him; each has various formulas, one modifying the other, and in its turn modified by the rest: consistency is too dearly bought at the expense of truth. His treatment of Bossuet and Fénelon respectively is an example of this: the former had in him more of the thinker, the latter of the Churchman, than we are apt to suppose; and M. Faguet describes without attempting to reconcile or co-ordinate the characteristics of each. There is a fine detachment in this absence of preconception, this aloofness. Except in the prefaces attached to the several volumes of his works-prefaces which, at once concise and suggestive, call for and will repay scrupulously careful reading-his personal views and sympathies seldom reveal themselves, and when they appear to do so it is rather as pointing out what others have overlooked than as pressing the note of private judgment. M. Faguet is the most impersonal as he is the most intelligent of critics, reproducing rather than depicting, eliciting rather than reading in. If criticism be, as he describes it, 'un don de vivre d'une infinité de vies étrangères, avec cette clarté de conscience que ne peut avoir que celui qui est assez fort pour se détacher et s'abstraire et regarder en étranger sa propre âme,' he may be assigned high rank as a critic; few have mastered the difficult art of putting themselves in the place of others so well as he. So far is this self-effacement carried that a criticism of his works resolves itself in great measure into a criticism of the writers and periods passed under review by him; he is, as nearly as it is possible to be, a reflecting medium-a mirror of ideas. The question that occurs is, What has he seen? And the answer is that little has escaped him he has seen 1 XVII Siècle, pp. 283, 333.

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almost, if not quite, all that there is to see. So much for the impersonal M. Faguet. But, as has been said, there is a personal, contrasting with the other as Mr. Jekyll to Dr. Hyde. Possessed, as before, by an idea, but here by a perverted and preconceived idea, he lays stress on the differential in such a manner and to such an extent as to lose sight of the more vital generic content of his conceptions; he is biased, a special pleader, an out-and-out partisan. It is especially in his treatment of the eighteenth century that he comes before us in this light. Not, it must be admitted, in dealing with its leading men: his summing up of Voltaire, perhaps its most representative figure, though unfriendly, is not, taken as a whole, unjust. But his antipathy to the temper and tendencies of the period is so strong that, while too veracious to tamper with his facts, to produce or omit them arbitrarily, he exaggerates its defects and minimises its excellencies till the result is a caricature rather than a portrait. He has asserted nothing that is contrary to fact, he has left out nothing that is essential; but the whole is seen out of focus, the impression left on the reader is onesided and untrue to life. One error in an account invalidates the whole calculation: his misconception of the age of the Encyclopædists and the Revolution results in a tendency to misconceive later problems, from which, though he struggles against it with greater success than might have been anticipated, he never wholly frees himself. 'I am not going to lay hands on my father Parmenides' is sense as well as piety; what the Eleatic teaching was to Socrates and his disciples the solvents of the Illumination are to the thinkers of our own time. Vainly would we forget the pit out of which we were taken. 'Honour thy father and thy mother' is a condition of valid thinking as well as of length of days.

We stand in an exceptionally favourable position for a review of this chapter of our spiritual history. The conventional divisions of time seldom correspond exactly with its real measurement : centuries overlap one another, because the forces that are at work in them are immaterial and escape our categories. But, allowance being made for