ignorance of the revolutionary significance of its oracles, has
drawn aside the curtain in its commentary. What, then, so
profound has it discovered in this Epicurean thesis?

"The desire for luxury and its enjoyments," it tells us; "the
singular love of it felt by the majority; the tendency of hearts
and minds to occupy themselves with it exclusively; the agreement
of individuals AND THE STATE in making it the motive and the end
of all their projects, all their efforts, and all their
sacrifices,--engender general or individual feelings which,
beneficent or injurious, become principles of action more potent,
perhaps, than any which have heretofore governed men."

Never had moralists a more favorable opportunity to assail the
sensualism of the century, the venality of consciences, and the
corruption instituted by the government: instead of that, what
does the Academy of Moral Sciences do? With the most automatic
calmness, it establishes a series in which luxury, so long
proscribed by the stoics and ascetics,--those masters of
holiness,--must appear in its turn as a principle of conduct as
legitimate, as pure, and as grand as all those formerly invoked
by religion and philosophy. Determine, it tells us, the motives
of action (undoubtedly now old and worn-out) of which LUXURY is
historically the providential successor, and, from the
results of the former, calculate the effects of the latter.
Prove, in short, that Aristippus was only in advance of his
century, and that his system of morality must have its day, as
well as that of Zeno and A Kempis.

We are dealing, then, with a society which no longer wishes to be