their method.  They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which concern a stone or a fungus.  They mistook for merely complicated traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own.  But who shall say that their method was not correct?  That it was not the only method?  They appealed to reason.  Would you have had them appeal to unreason?  They appealed to natural law.  Would you have had them appeal to unnatural law?—­law according to which God did not make this world?  Alas! that had been done too often already.  Solomon saw it done in his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end.  Rabelais saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the “Children of Physis and the Children of Antiphysis.”  But, born in an evil generation, which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he was sensual and, I fear, cowardly enough to hide his light, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests; and his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations which followed him, and thought they understood him.

But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and to reason for the power of discerning that same good—­if man cannot find truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?

And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the coadjutors of science.

We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics.  But we must recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did.  They recalled men to facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw—­What are the facts of the case?  Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.

Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more or less from that evil spirit which the old Romans called “Fama;” from her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and the cruellest of monsters.

From “Fama;” from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals, superstitions, public opinions—­whether from the ancient public opinion that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that those who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity, and therefore worthy of death—­from all these blasts of Fame’s lying trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and generally virtuous men, who, as students of physical science, devoted their lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of nature—­What are the facts of the case?