The different systems, of each of which I have endeavored to show the essential and characteristic vice, do not remain confined to learned regions, or to the classes to which, from profession or from taste, man and the world are a special object of study. The breath of science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, unseen itself, places even where ignorance reigns. How often in remote cities and even rural districts, among a population alien to every kind of study, have I met with and discovered the traces of Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pantheism, Materialism, Skepticism; and yet these had been imported, imperceptibly and in manner that the sense could not detect, like a noxious miasma, into places where their very names were unknown; and yet they bore everywhere their natural fruits! {370} There is a contagion in the intellectual as well as in the moral order; and the facility, the rapidity, the universality of communication, which contribute so much to the force and the grandeur of modern civilization, are as much at the disposal of evil as of good, of error as of truth. The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and Materialism seem very readily to prevail. {371} After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it even their refuge. These different social facts, and the influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy, manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or taciturn. Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very general--impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious perplexity.