[4] Hegel, _Werke_, viii. 314. [5] Haller, in his famous _Restauration der Staatswissenschaft_, chooses exactly the same point of departure as Bonald, namely, an attack on _Le Contrat Social_. [6] Bonald, _Du Divorce, considéré au 19me siècle relativement à l'état domestique et à l'état publique de la société_ (edition of 1817, pp. 29 and 31). [7] We owe to Madame Girardin the one witty thing that has been said on the subject of Buffon's dictum. When trying to prove that in each of George Sand's novels the influence of some real personage enthusiastically admired by the authoress is to be distinctly traced, she quotes the saying of a wit: "It is when we are criticising the works of women writers that we are most often obliged to exclaim with Buffon: _Le style c'est l'homme_." (Le Vicomte de Launay, _Lettres parisiennes_, i. 89). [8] Cf. _The Romantic School in Germany_, p. 42. [9] Cf. _The Romantic School in Germany_, pp. 12, 326. [10] Bonald, _Théorie du pouvoir_, i-iii.; _La législation primitive; Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles; Du divorce_; Barante, _Tableau de la littérature française au 18me siècle_; Lamennais, _Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_; Laurent, _Histoire du droit des gens_, xvi. [Illustration: CHATEAUBRIAND] IV "LE GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME" Chateaubriand's book, _Le Génie du Christianisme_, which originally bore the significant title _Beautés de la Religion Chrétienne_, marks the transition from the first to the second stage of the reaction, because, cold and devoid of real feeling as it is, it is an attempt to vindicate and rehabilitate authority by means of an appeal to sentiment and imagination. It was a defence of Christianity of a perfectly new species, from the fact that it appealed to imagination, not to faith; to sentiment, not to reason. It impresses one as being proffered under the conviction that reason was now inimical to Christianity, and that faith no longer existed. The author, not many years before he wrote this work, had been a free-thinker, indeed a materialist. We have proof of this in some marginal notes in his own handwriting, discovered by Sainte-Beuve in a book which had belonged to him. Alongside of the words: "God, matter, and destiny are one," Chateaubriand has written: "This is my system; this is what I believe." Alongside of the following sentences: "You say that God has created you free. That is not the point in question. Did he foresee that I should fall, that I should be miserable to all eternity? Yes, undoubtedly. In that case your God is nothing but a horrible and unreasonable tyrant," we read in the margin: "This objection is irrefutable, and completely demolishes the whole edifice of Christian doctrine. But in any case it is doctrine which no one believes in now."