as Rousseau—­had in view an elaborate, a priori, ideal system of government; but these were exceptions, and the majority of the Philosophes ignored politics proper altogether.  This was a great misfortune; but it was inevitable.  The beneficent changes which had been introduced so effectively and with such comparative ease into the government of England had been brought about by men of affairs; in France the men of affairs were merely the helpless tools of an autocratic machine, and the changes had to owe their origin to men uninstructed in affairs—­to men of letters.  Reform had to come from the outside, instead of from within; and reform of that kind spells revolution.  Yet, even here, there were compensating advantages.  The changes in England had been, for the most part, accomplished in a tinkering, unspeculative, hole-and-corner spirit; those in France were the result of the widest appeal to first principles, of an attempt, at any rate, to solve the fundamental problems of society, of a noble and comprehensive conception of the duties and destiny of man.  This was the achievement of the Philosophes.  They spread far and wide, not only through France, but through the whole civilized world, a multitude of searching interrogations on the most vital subjects; they propounded vast theories, they awoke new enthusiasms, and uplifted new ideals.  In two directions particularly their influence has been enormous.  By their insistence on the right of free opinion and on the paramount necessity of free speculation, untrammelled by the fetters of orthodoxy and tradition, they established once for all as the common property of the human race that scientific spirit which has had such an immense effect on modern civilization, and whose full import we are still only just beginning to understand.  And, owing mainly to their efforts also, the spirit of humanity has come to be an abiding influence in the world.  It was they who, by their relentless exposure of the abuses of the French judicial system—­the scandal of arbitrary imprisonment, the futile barbarism of torture, the medieval abominations of the penal code—­finally instilled into public opinion a hatred of cruelty and injustice in all their forms; it was they who denounced the horrors of the slave-trade; it was they who unceasingly lamented the awful evils of war.  So far as the actual content of their thought was concerned, they were not great originators.  The germs of their most fruitful theories they found elsewhere—­chiefly among the thinkers of England; and, when they attempted original thinking on their own account, though they were bold and ingenious, they were apt also to be crude.  In some sciences—­political economy, for instance, and psychology—­they led the way, but attained to no lasting achievement.  They suffered from the same faults as Montesquieu in his Esprit des Lois.  In their love of pure reason, they relied too often on the swift processes of argument for the solution of difficult problems,