His various changes of belief have often been taken as an index of vacillation; but a simple and candid study of his writings shows that such changes were merely the normal progress of an intensely earnest and sincere mind, which never hesitated to avow its honest convictions nor to admit its errors.  This is the quality which gives Brownson his vitality as a mind and an author; and he will be found to be consistent with conscience throughout.

His writings are forceful, eloquent, and lucid in style, with a Websterian massiveness that does not detract from their charm.  They fill twenty volumes, divided into groups of essays on Civilization, Controversy, Religion, Philosophy, Scientific Theories, and Popular Literature, which cover a great and fascinating variety of topics in detail.  Brownson was an intense and patriotic American, and his national quality comes out strongly in his extended treatise ’The American Republic’ (1865).  The best known of his other works is a candid, vigorous, and engaging autobiography entitled ‘The Convert’ (1853).

SAINT-SIMONISM

From ‘The Convert’

If I drew my doctrine of Union in part from the eclecticism of Cousin, I drew my views of the Church and of the reorganization of the race from the Saint-Simonians,—­a philo-sophico-religious or a politico-philosophical sect that sprung up in France under the Restoration, and figured largely for a year or two under the monarchy of July.  Their founder was Claude Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, a descendant of the Due de Saint-Simon, well known as the author of the ‘Memoirs.’  He was born in 1760, entered the army at the age of seventeen, and the year after came to this country, where he served with distinction in our Revolutionary War under Bouillie.  After the peace of 1783 he devoted two years to the study of our people and institutions, and then returned to France.  Hardly had he returned before he found himself in the midst of the French Revolution, which he regarded as the practical application of the principles or theories adopted by the reformers of the sixteenth century and popularized by the philosophers of the eighteenth.  He looked upon that revolution, we are told, as having only a destructive mission—­necessary, important, but inadequate to the wants of humanity; and instead of being carried away by it as were most of the young men of his age and his principles, he set himself at work to amass materials for the erection of a new social edifice on the ruins of the old, which should stand and improve in solidity, strength, grandeur, and beauty forever.