The negative and the positive movements which have been going on in Western Europe since the close of the Middle Ages, have been of course connected with each other. But the former has necessarily advanced with greater rapidity than the latter. The old system had so entirely declined, that a desire for social regeneration had become general, before the groundwork of the new system had been sufficiently completed for its true character to be understood. As we have just seen, the doctrine by which social regeneration is now to be directed could not have arisen previously to the Revolution. The impulse which the Revolution gave to thought was indispensable to its formation. Here then was an insurmountable fatality by which men were forced to make use of the critical principles which had been found serviceable in former struggles, as the only available instruments of construction. As soon as the old order had once been fairly abandoned, there was of course no utility whatever in the negative philosophy. But its doctrines had become familiar to men’s minds, and its motto of ‘Liberty and Equality’, was at that time the one most compatible with social progress. Thus the first stage of the revolutionary movement was accomplished under the influence of principles that had become obsolete, and that were quite inadequate to the new task required of them. For constructive purposes the revolutionary philosophy was valueless; except so far as it put forward a vague programme of the political future founded on sentiment rather than conviction, and unaccompanied by any explanation of the right mode of realizing it. In default of organic principles the doctrines of the critical school were employed: and the result speedily showed their inherent tendency to anarchy; a tendency as perilous to the germs of the new order as to the ruins of the old. The experiment was tried once for all, and it left such ineffaceable memories that it is not probable that any serious attempt will be made to repeat it. The incapacity for construction inherent in the doctrine in which the revolutionary spirit had embodied itself was placed beyond the reach of doubt. The result was to impress every one with the urgent necessity for social renovation; but the principles of that renovation were still left undetermined. [Counter-revolution from 1794 to 1830]