discussing the danger of shaking the ancient faith of the people in religious institutions. But the French mind could not rest in this severance of logic and practice. To their more incisive and less humble way of thinking, true was true and false was false, and to confound the boundaries of truth and falsehood was only to pay homage to canting hypocrisy. There was no distinction for them between an illusion and a plain lie, nor would they rest satisfied with a suppression of truth as known to individual reason, in order to leave room for a practical faith as taught by public experience. So it happened that the _philosophes_ as a body were not theoretical sceptics merely but militant atheists. If, as La Mettrie believed, "the soul is an empty word of which no one has any idea," if men are no more than blind "moles creeping in the field of nature," then, o' God's name, out with the truth of it; society can only profit from universal knowledge of the facts. In like manner a Holbach will take up the old theory of Polybius, but without the Polybian and the British "reserve." "Experience," he says, "teaches us that sacred opinions were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason." And again: "An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers to explain the operations of nature." And the French view has prevailed, or threatens to prevail, as courageous views inevitably tend to supplant timid views, however true it may be that courage in such matters may sometimes be another name for insensibility, not to say conceit. So Leslie Stephen, writing of the eighteenth century in England, with a sneer that contrives to combine the French boldness with the British reserve, declares that "the church, in short, was excellent as a national refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in its doctrines." And at last Mr. Dewey, perhaps the most influential teacher to-day in America, is renewing the old cry and persuading our young men that religion is a fallacy of the reason devised to maintain the more fortunate classes in their iniquitous claims, and that progress and democracy are bound up with the materialistic pragmatism that emanates from his own chair of reconstructed philosophy.