for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted. We
are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human
nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of
man. The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.
The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great
directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its
intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that
rejection.

After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was
marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant
feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea
and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral
motive. It rested on a conception which was crude and imperfect enough,
but which was still almost, like the great ecclesiastical conception
itself, a conception of life as a whole. Morality, positive law, social
order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the
constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged
themselves from theological explanations. The final philosophical
movement of the century in France, which was represented by Diderot,
now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely positive basis.
If this movement had only added to its other contents the historic idea,
its destination would have been effectually reached. As it was, its
leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide
a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world
a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the
ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new
comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopædia.