beneath the surface.[B] He was curious in all matters of art,
literature, and science, but his curiosity was easily appeased. He raves
about Ossian, gazes for hours on the Maison Carrée at Nismes, writes
letters to Paine on arcs and catenaries, busies himself with
vocabularies, natural history, geology, discourses magisterially about
Newton and Lavoisier, and studies nothing thoroughly. One can see by the
way in which he handles his technical terms that he does not know the
use of them. He was a smatterer of that most dangerous kind, who feel
certain they have arrived at truth. Like so many other children of the
eighteenth century, he rejected the past with disdain, but was blindly
credulous of the future; and was ready to embrace an absurdity if it
came in a new and scientific shape. The marquises and abbés he met in
France had dreamed over elementary principles of society and government,
until they had lost themselves in wandering mazes like Milton's
speculative and erring angels. He believed that those gay _philosophes_
had discovered the magical stone of social science, and that misery and
sin would be transmuted into virtue and happiness. It was only necessary
to kill all the kings and to confide in the reason and virtue of the
people, and the thing was done. The scenes of 1789 stimulated
Jefferson's natural tendency beyond the bounds of common sense. He
asserted that Indians without a government were better off than
Europeans with one, and that half the world a desert with only an Adam
and Eve left in each country to repopulate it would be an improvement in
the condition of Europe. He became a bigot of liberalism. Luckily he
had his American blood and practical education to restrain him, or he
might have been as foolish as Brissot and as rabid as Marat. As it was,
he could not help perceiving in his calmer moments that this new path to
the glorious future which the _philosophes_ were pointing out to their
countrymen, had been for many years in America the well-worn high road
of the nation.