In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian era.It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof.But I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with my description of the very same era as one of decay and death.For side by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with the decay there was active growth;--side by side with them, fostered by them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or unconscious.We must beware, however, of trying to find between that decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really none.The general decay may have determined the course of many men's thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as Ihave heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Regime--a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth.That would be to confess man--what I shall never confess him to be--the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox.In the first place, the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as Samson's bees did in that of the lion.But bees or flies, each sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the decay of the Ancien Regime.There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, as did Marat:
but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God." All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so, like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward toward the brute.
Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of thought, an originality, a resistance to circumstances, an indignant defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind.Had that latter been the case, the downward progress of the Ancien Regime would have been irremediable.Each generation, conformed more and more to the element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic struggle for revenge and bread.
There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by circumstances.Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state; some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain), but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord and Giver of Life.
Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in England and in Germany.But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny of that great nation for awhile--perhaps for ever.
M.de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which appears at first sight to militate against my belief--a chapter "showing that France was the country in which men had become most alike.""The men," he says, "of that time, especially those belonging to the upper and middle ranks of society, who alone were at all conspicuous, were all exactly alike."And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle classes, it must have been still more true of the mass of the lowest population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded--or rather crushed--by their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants of five senses, common to all alike.
But when M.de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the circumstances of their political state--to that "government of one man which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all mutually indifferent to their common fate"--we must differ, even from him: for facts prove the impotence of that, or of any other circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in them anything but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance.