none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's
thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have 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