[96] “... What is styled Materialism is in the ascendant. To those who believe that an Atheistical society, though it may be polished and amiable, involves the seeds of anarchy, the prospect is full of gloom.” [97] “... Let us at length discover that no society can long subsist that is based upon metaphysical absurdities.... Before me is a famous treatise on human nature by a Professor of Königsberg. No one has more profoundly meditated on the attributes of his subject. It is evident that in the deep study of his own intelligence he has discovered a noble method of expounding that of others. Yet when I close his volumes, can I conceal from myself that all this time I have been studying a treatise upon the nature--not of man, but of a German?”--_Contarini Fleming._ [98] The hackneyed _mot_ of “Sensible men never tell” is derived from _Voltaire_. [99] In the Preface to _Lothair_ he says:--“The sceptical efforts of the discoveries of science, and the uneasy feeling that they cannot co-exist with our old religious convictions, have their origin in the conviction that the general body who have suddenly become conscious of these physical truths are not so well acquainted as is desirable with the past history of man. Astonished by their unprepared emergence from ignorance to a certain degree of information, their amazed intelligence takes refuge in the theory of what is conveniently called Progress, and every step in scientific discovery seems further to remove them from the path of primæval inspiration. But there is no fallacy so flagrant as to suppose that the modern ages have the peculiar privilege of scientific discovery, or that they are distinguished as the epochs of the most illustrious inventions. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals? It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century, when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo. But Hipparchus, who lived before our Divine Master ... discovered the precession of the equinoxes; and Copernicus ... avows himself as only the champion of Pythagoras.... Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things ... will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man....” So, too, in a speech of 1861, dealing both with science and the higher criticism, “Epicurus was, I apprehend, as great a man as Hegel; but it was not Epicurus who subverted the religion of Olympus.” [100] Probably always in England. In France the reverse is happening.