Philosophy (I mean the true, for school-learning is nothing but the dregs and refuse of it) has not shone with greater lustre among the Jesuits; but has it been more brilliant among the other orders? It is almost impossible that a member of any community should become a great philosopher: the spirit of a society, of a monastick society in particular, and more perhaps than any other, the domineering spirit of the Jesuits, that of a servile devotion to their superiors, are so many fetters to reason, repugnant to that freedom of thinking which is so necessary to philosophy. Malebranche is the only philosopher of eminence that ever belonged to a regular congregation; but that congregation was composed of free-men; and, besides, Malebranche is perhaps less a great philosopher, than an excellent philosophic writer. If any order (by the by) could have hoped to dispute with the Jesuits the pre-eminence in the sciences and in literature, and perhaps to have borne away the palm from them, it is this congregation of the Oratory, of which Malebranche was a most distinguished member. The freedom enjoyed there, without being ever hampered by vows, the permission of thinking differently from their superiors, and of employing their talents according to their own pleasure, this was what furnished the congregation of the Oratory with excellent preachers, profound scholars, men illustrious in every way. Accordingly the Jesuits were very sensible what they had to fear from such rivals. They persecuted them; and the members of the Oratory had the folly to expose a weak side to them by becoming Jansenists[6]. By this means they furnished a pretext to the attacks of their enemies, and have had the grief to see the decay of their congregation brought about by their own fault. They have indeed just now collected a few tattered remains from the plunder of the Jesuits; but these remains will hardly ever be able to replace what they have lost. We ought, besides, to do them the justice to own, that they testified not any eagerness to profit by the ruin of their adversaries: the society in its misfortune experienced, on the part of the Oratory, a moderation of which they had never given them the example. But be this moderation counterfeit or sincere, it is difficult to persuade one’s-self that the Oratory will ever recover with lustre the blows which have been given it by the Jesuits: the varnish of Jansenism with which it is still stained, and which renders it at least suspected by the greater part of the bishops, the almost general prejudice of the public, and of the greater part of the magistrates, against all communities, of whatever kind they be, and, above all, the philosophic spirit which makes every day great progress, seems to forebode the end of this, and of other fraternities.