his principles. He fully accepted Adam Smith's theory of non-interference in economical matters; and his view of philosophy in the lump was that there was no such thing, only a heap of obsolete fallacies and superstitions which would be easily dispersed by the application of a little downright common sense. Bentham's utilitarianism, again, is congenial to the whole intellectual movement. His ethical theory was substantially identical with that of Paley--the most conspicuous writer upon theology of the generation,--and Paley is as thoroughly empirical in his theology as in his ethics, and makes the truth of religion essentially a question of historical and scientific evidence. It follows that neither in practice nor in speculative questions were the English thinkers of the time prescient of any coming revolution. They denounced abuses, but they had regarded abuses as removable excrescences on a satisfactory system. They were content to appeal to common sense, and to leave philosophers to wrangle over ultimate results. They might be, and in fact were, stirring questions which would lead to far more vital disputes; but for the present they were unconscious of the future, and content to keep the old machinery going though desiring to improve its efficiency. The characteristic might be elucidated by comparison with the other great European literatures. In France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or, as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their characteristic fashion, were pushing logic to its consequences, and fully awake to the approach of an impending catastrophe. In Germany the movement took the philosophical and literary shape. Lessing's critical writings had heralded the change. Goethe, after giving utterance to passing phases of thought, was rising to become the embodiment of a new ideal of intellectual culture. Schiller passed through the storm and stress period and developed into the greatest national dramatist. Kant had awakened from his dogmatic theory, and the publication of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in 1781 had awakened the philosophical world of Germany. In both countries the study of earlier English literature, of the English deists and freethinkers, of Shakespeare and of Richardson, had had great influence, and had been the occasion of new developments. But it seemed as though England had ceased to be the originator of ideas, and was for the immediate future at least to receive political and philosophical impulses from France and Germany. To explain the course taken in the different societies, to ask how far it