themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity.
Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with him
all the philosophers of his century, ran counter to all common sense,
and refused to recognise that animals might possess a soul-like
principle which, however remotely, might link them to the human being.

When, in the eighteenth century, minds became emancipated from the
narrow restrictions of religious discipline, and when method was
introduced into the study of scientific problems, Nature took her
revenge as well in literature as in all other fields of human thought.
Rousseau it was who inaugurated the movement in France, and the whole of
Europe followed in the wake of France. It may even be declared that the
reaction against the seventeenth century was in many respects excessive,
for the eighteenth century gave itself up to a species of sentimental
debauch. It is none the less a fact that the author of _La Nouvelle
Heloise_ was the first to blend the moral life of man with his exterior
surroundings. He felt the savage beauty and grandeur of the mountains
of Switzerland, the grace of the Savoy horizons, and the more familiar
elegance of the Parisian suburbs. We may say that he opened the eye
of humanity to the spectacle which the world offered it. In Germany,
Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling have proclaimed him their master;
while even in England, Byron, and George Eliot herself, have recognised
all that they owed to him.

The first of Rosseau's disciples in France was Bernardin de St. Pierre,
whose name has frequently been recalled in connection with Loti. Indeed,
the charming masterpiece of _Paul and Virginia_ was the first example
of exoticism in literature; and thereby it excited the curiosity of
our fathers at the same time that it dazzled them by the wealth and
brilliancy of its descriptions.