[327] Louis xv. et xvi., p. 226.

[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.

[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, s.v. Herder.

[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater’s name is most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius.  “It is supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already marked by nature.  For my part, I should think that besides this development, the features of a man’s countenance form themselves insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual wearing into them of certain affections of the soul.  These affections mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it.”  IV. 49, 50.

[331] Author’s Preface, x.

[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret’s Herder, 322.

[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.

[334] E.g. pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.

[335] E.g. Bk.  I. Sec. 5, p. 279.  Sec. 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion concerning the female sex).

[336] Vv. 670-703.  We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, n.) that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist as “an Orpheus and omnipotent in song,” coincides with Rousseau’s comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to “the divine Orpheus singing the first hymn” (Emile, IV. 205).

CHAPTER V.

THE SAVOYARD VICAR.

The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D’Holbach’s dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace, not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception.  A hope of this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good attributes brings solace and nourishment.  A movement like that of Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then leave no trace behind.  It springs from many other sources besides that of adherence to the truth of its dogmas.  The stream of its influence must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been confined to the least informed portions of a community.  The Encyclopaedists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken ecclesiastical organisation.  They forgot that religious sentiment on the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were both of them still left behind.  They had convinced themselves by a host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous