so do the limits of nescience become more definite.  The more we know of the universal order, the more are we persuaded, however gradually and insensibly, that certain matters which men believed themselves to know outside of this phenomenal order, are in truth inaccessible by those instruments of experience and observation to which we are indebted for other knowledge.  Hence, a natural inclination to devote our faculty to the forces within our control, and to withdraw it from vain industry about forces—­if they be forces—­which are beyond our control and beyond our apprehension.  Thus man becomes the centre of the world to himself, nature his servant and minister, human society the field of his interests and his exertions.  The sensational psychology, again, whether scientifically defensible or not, clearly tends to heighten our idea of the power of education and institutions upon character.  The more vividly we realise the share of external impressions in making men what they are, the more ready we shall be to concern ourselves with external conditions and their improvement.  The introduction of the positive spirit into the observation of the facts of society was not to be expected until the Cartesian philosophy, with its reliance on inexplicable intuitions and its exaggeration of the method of hypothesis, had been laid aside.

Diderot struck a key-note of difference between the old Catholic spirit and the new social spirit, between quietist superstition and energetic science, in the casual sentence in his article on alms-houses and hospitals:  “It would be far more important to work at the prevention of misery, than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable.”

It is very easy to show that the Encyclopaedists had not established an impregnable scientific basis for their philosophy.  Anybody can now see that their metaphysic and psychology were imperfectly thought out.  The important thing is that their metaphysic and psychology were calculated, notwithstanding all their superficialities, to inspire an energetic social spirit, because they were pregnant with humanistic sentiment.  To represent the Encyclopaedia as the gospel of negation and denial is to omit four-fifths of its contents.  Men may certainly, if they please, describe it as merely negative work, for example, to denounce such institutions as examination and punishment by Torture (See Question, Peine), but if so, what gospel of affirmation can bring better blessings?[159] If the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that, so long as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on which the progress and even the very life of the nation depended?  It would be obviously unfair to say that reasoned interest in social improvement is incompatible with a spiritualistic doctrine, but we are justified in saying that energetic faith in possibilities of social progress has been first reached through the philosophy of sensation and experience.