But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the circumstances of their political state—­to that “government of one man which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all mutually indifferent to their common fate”—­we must differ, even from him:  for facts prove the impotence of that, or of any other circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in them anything but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance.

For all the while there was, among these very French, here and there a variety of character and purpose, sufficient to burst through that very despotism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, and quite original shapes.  Thus it was proved that the uniformity had been only in their outside crust and shell.  What tore the nation to pieces during the Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the characters which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry?  What else gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the parvenu heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a self-dependent audacity, which made them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of the civilised world?  If there was one doctrine which the French Revolution specially proclaimed—­which it caricatured till it brought it into temporary disrepute—­it was this:  that no man is like another; that in each is a God-given “individuality,” an independent soul, which no government or man has a right to crush, or can crush in the long run:  but which ought to have, and must have, a “carriere ouverte aux talents,” freely to do the best for itself in the battle of life.  The French Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to convert the world some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances, the puppet of institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the modern world out of the decay of the mediaeval world, the French philosophes and encyclopaedists are, of course, the most notorious.  They confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had come from England.  They were, or considered themselves, the disciples of Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.

And first, a few words on these same philosophes.  One may be thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of their sins, moral as well as intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them fairly—­which can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any fair judgment of them will, I think, lead to the conclusion that they were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind had as yet held sacred.  Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred thing they reverenced, which men had forgotten more and more since the seventeenth century—­common justice