He honours reason; not the individual reason, source of innumerable errors, but the general reason, which, emanating from God, reveals universal and immutable truth--_quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_. To commence philosophising we should despise the philosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes a special study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of God, the Grand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is no government without an executioner. But God is pitiful, and allows us the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no society; without the Catholic Church there is no religion; without the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic Church. The sovereignty of the Pope is therefore the keystone of civilisation; his it is to give and take away the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over the people, the Pontiff absolute over governments--such is the earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in heaven. To suppose that men can begin the world anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the folly of private reason; society is an organism which grows under providential laws; revolutions are the expiation for sins. Such are the ideas which Maistre bound together in serried logic, and deployed with the mastery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from individualism to authority could not have found a more absolute expression.