lavished a while ago on a bad book by that author seem at least to allow
us to point him out as their chief. They derive their name from studies
in history and archæology, with which we here have nothing to do. They
are regarded as forming a philosophical and religious school, and it is
in that connection that they claim our attention. Their influence is
incontestable, and still, notwithstanding, their doctrinal value is
nothing. They form merely a literary branch of the positivist school
engrafted upon the eclecticism of M. Cousin. We find in their writings
the pretension to limit science to the experimental study of nature and
to humanity. We afterwards find there the pretension to understand and
to accept all doctrines alike. Beyond this, nothing. The critics bestow
particular attention on the phenomena of religion, of art, and of
philosophy; but this interest is purely historical. Nothing is more
curious than the successive forms of human beliefs; but the period of
beliefs is over. Religious faith no longer subsists except in minds
which are behind the age; and philosophy, upheld in a final swoon by
Hegel and Hamilton, has just yielded its last breath in the arms of M.
Cousin: so M. Renan informs us.[50] To choose a side between the
defenders of the idea of God and its opponents; to choose between Plato
and Epicurus, between Origen and Celsus, between Descartes and Hobbes,
between Leibnitz and Spinoza, would be to make one's self the Don
Quixote of thought. An honest man may find amusement in reading the
Amadis of Gaul; the Knight of _la Manche_ went mad through putting
faith in the adventures of that hero. A like fate befalls those minds
which are simple enough to believe still, in the midst of the nineteenth
century, in the brave chimeras of former days. Let us study history, let
us study nature; beyond that we do not know, and we never shall know,
anything. Our fashionable men of letters develop their thesis with so
much assurance; they lavish upon believers so many expressions of
amiable disdain; they appear so sure of being the interpreters of the