The great men in France who cleared the minds of the people for the coming revolution were themselves uncompromisingly revolutionary. They did not recognise outside authority of any kind whatsoever. Religion, natural science, society, the state, all were subjected to the most unsparing criticism, and everything was compelled to justify its existence before the judgment seat of reason or perish. Reason was established as the one and universal measure. It was the time when, as Hegel said, the world was turned upside down, first in the sense that the human mind and the principles arrived at by process of thought were claimed as the foundations of all human actions and social relations, but later also, in the wider sense, that the reality which contradicted these theories had indeed to be turned upside down. All forms of society and the state existent heretofore, all survivals of old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as unreasonable. Up to that time the world had only allowed itself to be led by prejudice. All that had been done deserved merely pity and contempt. Now for the first time day broke: from now on, superstition, injustice, tyranny and privilege should be replaced by eternal truth, eternal justice, equality founded on natural rights and the inalienable rights of man. We now know that the rule of reason was nothing more than the rule of the bourgeoisie idealised, that eternal right found its realisation in bourgeois justice, that equality was materialised in bourgeois equality before the law, that when the rights of man were proclaimed bourgeois rights of property were proclaimed at one and the same time, and that the state of reason, Rousseau's Social Contract, could only come into existence as the bourgeois democratic republic. To such a slight extent could the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, just as their predecessors, prevail over the limits which their own epoch had placed upon them.