sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see a
dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an
army formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a
priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he might
possibly, like every man of genius in France, have imbibed
extravagant prejudices against monarchy and Christianity. The
wit which blasted the sophisms of Escobar--the impassioned
eloquence which defended the sisters of Port Royal--the
intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by Papal
authority--might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the
Philosophical Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of
inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to
Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made
the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science,
indeed, had then reached such a point that, if neither of them
had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to
some person within a few years. So in our own time the doctrine
of rent, now universally received by political economists, was
propounded, almost at the same moment, by two writers unconnected
with each other. Preceding speculators had long been blundering
round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed much
longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think
that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to
the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that
without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans,--that without
Columbus America would have been discovered,--that without Locke
we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human
ideas. Society indeed has its great men and its little men, as
the earth has its mountains and its valleys. But the
inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface