Of course, all these characteristics of our own society mark tendencies that are common enough in all societies.  They often spring from an indolence and enervation that besets a certain number of people, however invigorating the general mental climate may be.  What we are now saying is that the general mental climate itself has, outside of the domain of physical science, ceased to be invigorating; that, on the contrary, it fosters the more inglorious predispositions of men, and encourages a native willingness, already so strong, to acquiesce in a lazy accommodation with error, an ignoble economy of truth, and a vicious compromise of the permanent gains of adhering to a sound general principle, for the sake of the temporary gains of departing from it.

Without attempting an elaborate analysis of the causes that have brought about this debilitation of mental tone, we may shortly remind ourselves of one or two facts in the political history, in the intellectual history, and in the religious history of this generation, which perhaps help us to understand a phenomenon that we have all so keen an interest both in understanding and in modifying.

To begin with what lies nearest to the surface.  The most obvious agency at work in the present exaggeration of the political standard as the universal test of truth, is to be found in some contemporary incidents.  The influence of France upon England since the revolution of 1848 has tended wholly to the discredit of abstract theory and general reasoning among us, in all that relates to politics, morals, and religion.  In 1848, not in 1789, questions affecting the fundamental structure and organic condition of the social union came for the first time into formidable prominence.  For the first time those questions and the answers to them were stated in articulate formulas and distinct theories.  They were not merely written in books; they so fascinated the imagination and inflamed the hopes of the time, that thousands of men were willing actually to go down into the streets and to shed their blood for the realisation of their generous dream of a renovated society.  The same sight has been seen since, and even when we do not see it, we are perfectly aware that the same temper is smouldering.  Those were premature attempts to convert a crude aspiration into a political reality, and to found a new social order on a number of umcompromising deductions from abstract principles of the common weal.  They have had the natural effect of deepening the English dislike of a general theory, even when such a theory did no more than profess to announce a remote object of desire, and not the present goal of immediate effort.