Old intellectual system was discredited

This suggests a fourfold division: the school of thought whereby the old intellectual system was discredited; that by which the old political system was destroyed; those who laboured to construct a new intellectual and moral basis of society; and those who sought to construct a new social and political system. These schools and teachers, writers and politicians, cannot be rigidly separated from each other. Each overlaps the other, and most of them combine the characteristics of all in more or less degree. The most pugnacious of the critics did something in the way of reconstructing the intellectual basis.

The most constructive spirits of the new world did much both directly and indirectly to destroy the old. Critics of the orthodox faith were really destroying the throne and the ancient rule, even when they least designed it. Orthodox supporters of radical reforms rung the knell of the mediaeval faith as much as that of the mediaeval society. The spiritual and temporal organisation of human life had grown up together; and in death it was not divided guided tours istanbul.

Revolution at hand

All through the eighteenth century the intellectual movement was gathering vitality and volume. From the opening years of the epoch the genius of Leibnitz saw the inevitable effect the movement must have upon the old society; and, in his memorable prophecy of the Revolution at hand (1704), he warned the chiefs of that society to prepare for the storm. For three generations France seemed to live only in thought. Action descended to the vilest and most petty level which her history had ever reached. From the death of Colbert, in 1683, until the ministry of Turgot, in 1774, France seemed to have lost the race of great statesmen, and to be delivered over to the intriguer and the sycophant. Well may the historian say that in passing from the politicians of the reign of Louis xv. to the thinkers of the same epoch, we seem to be passing from the world of the pigmies to that of the Titans. Into the world of ideas France flung herself with passion and with hope.

The wonderful accumulation of scientific discoveries which followed the achievements of Newton reacted powerfully on religious thought, and even on practical policy. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, began to assume the outlined proportion of coherent sciences; and some vague sense of their connection and real unity filled the mind of all.

Out of the physical sciences there emerged a dim conception of a crowning human science, which it was the grand achievement of the eighteenth century to found. History ceased to be a branch of literature; it began to have practical uses for mankind of to-day; and slowly it was recognised as the momentous life-story of man, the autobiography of the human race. Europe no longer absorbed the interest of cultivated thought. The unity of the planet, the community of all who dwell on it, gave a new colour to the whole range of thought; and as the old dogmas of the supernatural Church began to lose their hold on the mind, the new-born enthusiasm of humanity began to fill all hearts.