Any one taking up Bonald's works directly after De Maistre's will have difficulty in wading through them. For nearly all of them are deadly dull. There are no human beings in his books, nothing but doctrines, and Bonald's doctrines consist of theologico-political propositions, which we are required to accept without proof. One cannot imagine a mind with a more implicit belief in dogmas, that is to say, a mind which more entirely ignores realities and scientific thought. He seems never to have doubted. Never once during his long career as an author does it appear to have entered his mind to question any one of the few simple fundamental principles on which he bases his theories. These principles are to be found in his works in a petrified form--speaking exactly, in the form of triads. Like the scholastics of the Middle Ages before him, like Hegel after him, Bonald thinks in triads, only he thinks without any perception of the two-sidedness of ideas, without flexibility, without inspiration. All relations are by him reduced to the great triad of cause, means, and effect. In the state we have power as the cause, ministers as the means, and subjects as the effect. In the religious world we have the triad--God, Jesus the Mediator, and man. In another acceptation Jesus is himself power, minister, and subject--power by his thought, minister by his word, subject as sacrifice. In the political sense, too, he is power, minister, and subject--power as King of the Jews, minister as priest, subject as the submissive martyr. In the family, in society, in the state, in the universe, the same tri-unity is demonstrated; and all this is done with the aim of proving the necessity and the truth of monarchy. Monarchy is a true thing because it is founded on the principle by which the world is ordered. The universe is monarchic. Hence revolutionists and republicans, who have dared for the moment to abolish monarchy, have actually been making the bold attempt to overturn the order of the universe. It is not a constitution which they have abolished, but _the_ constitution, for there is only one. Bonald jeers at the witness of experience, scorns that of history--the lessons of experience are without significance to him who is in possession of the eternal, fundamental principles. Even natural history he will have nothing to do with, because in it he perceives the idea of evolution, which is of the evil one. There is no such thing as historical evolution; there is historical tradition, and it is to this we must cling. For by means of tradition we reach God. In the chain of blind men which we call humanity only the first blind man requires a staff, and this staff is the commandment of God, which is transmitted by tradition.