We have seen that the church had an irreconcilable enemy in Voltaire;
that the government of France had found a critic of weight and
importance in Montesquieu; that the Economists had attacked the
financial organization of the country. But the assaults of the
Philosophic school were not leveled at the religious and civil
administration alone. The very foundations of French thought, slowly
laid through previous ages, were made in the reign of Louis XV. the
subject of examination, and by a very dogmatic set of thinkers were
pronounced to be valueless. Nor were men left at a loss for something to
put in the place of what was thus destroyed. The teachings of Locke,
explained and amplified by Condillac and many others, obtained an
authority which was but feebly disputed. The laws against free speech
and free printing, intended for the defense of the old doctrines,
deterred no one from expressing radical opinions. Only persons of
conservative and law-abiding temperament, the natural defenders of
things existing, were restrained by legal and ecclesiastical terrors.
The champions of the old modes of thought stood like mediaeval men at
arms before a discharge of artillery, prevented from rushing on the guns
of the enemy by the weight of the armor that protected them no longer.
The new philosophy, stimulated and hardly impeded by feeble attempts at
persecution, was therefore able to overrun the intellectual life of the
nation, until it found its most formidable opponent in one who was half
its ally, and who had sprung from its midst, the mighty heretic,
Rousseau.

The most voluminous work of the Philosophers is the "Encyclopaedia," a
book of great importance in the history of the human mind. The
conception of its originators was not a new one. The attempt to bring