This fatal circle can be broken only by the aid of principles which all the metamorphoses of sensation do not engender, and for which interest cannot account, which none the less subsist to the honor and for the safety of humanity. These principles are those that time has little by little drawn from Christianity in order to give them for the guidance of modern societies. You will find them written in the glorious declaration of rights that forever broke the monarchy of Louis XV., and prepared the constitutional monarchy. They are in the charter that governs us, in our laws, in our institutions, in our manners, in the air that we breathe. They serve at once as foundations for our society and the new philosophy necessary to a new order.[201] Perhaps you will ask me how, in the eighteenth century, so many distinguished, so many honest souls could let themselves be seduced by a system that must have been revolting to all their sentiments. I will answer by reminding you that the eighteenth century was an immoderate reaction against the faults into which had sadly fallen the old age of a great century and a great king, that is to say, the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the persecution of all free and elevated philosophy, a narrow and suspicious devotion, and intolerance, with its usual companion, hypocrisy. These excesses must have produced opposite excesses. Mme. de Maintenon opened the route to Mme. de Pompadour. After the mode of devotion comes that of license; it takes every thing by storm. It descends from the court to the nobility, to the clergy even, and accordingly to the people. It carried away the best spirits, even genius itself. It put a foreign philosophy in the place of the national philosophy, culpable, persecuted as it had been, for not being irreconcilable with Christianity. A disciple of Locke, whom Locke had discarded, Condillac, took the place of Descartes, as the author of _Candide_ and _la Pucelle_ had taken the place of Corneille and Bossuet, as Boucher and Vanloo had taken the place of Lesueur and Poussin. The ethics of pleasure and interest were the necessary ethics of that epoch. It must not be supposed from this that all souls were corrupt. Men, says M. Royer-Collard, are neither as good nor as bad as their principles[202]. No stoic has been as austere as stoicism, no epicurean as enervated as epicureanism. Human weakness practically baffles virtuous theories; in return, thank God, the instinct of the heart condemns to inconsistency the honest man who errs in bad theories. Accordingly, in the eighteenth century, the most generous and most disinterested sentiments often shone forth under the reign of the philosophy of sensation and the ethics of interest. But it is none the less true, that the philosophy of sensation is false, and the ethics of interest destructive of all morality.