deeply we penetrate into the history of opinion, the more strongly are we tempted to believe that in the great matters of speculation no question is altogether new, and hardly any answer is altogether new.  But the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth.  They were isolated; they were for the most part submissive; and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp mortal.  And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could compensate.  They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social idea.  They could have set opinion right about the efficacy of the syllogism, and the virtue of entities and quiddities.  They could have taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun.  But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties of moral and social direction.  This function, so immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted.  We are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of man.  The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.  The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that rejection.

After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant feature.  In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea and by the social idea.  It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral motive.  It rested on a conception which was crude and imperfect enough, but which was still almost, like the great ecclesiastical conception itself, a conception of life as a whole.  Morality, positive law, social order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged themselves from theological explanations.  The final philosophical movement of the century in France, which was represented by Diderot, now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely positive basis.  If this movement had only added to its other contents the historic idea, its destination would have been effectually reached.  As it was, its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority.  The great symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopaedia.