Contempt for the past is associated with a passion for reform. Men think of destroying that which should only be transformed. They condemn everything that has been, unconditionally, and launch out towards a new future. The suffering which has been gone through irritates and troubles the mind. The work of pulling down is so easy, it is supposed that the work of building up is equally so. Hence systems rise, as if the world were to begin anew. The pride of liberty and of human action becomes the principle of science; and, like all new principles, it pretends to exclusive and absolute dominion. Rationalism governs; abstract philosophy ignores the traditions and the requirements of the life of nations; and finds now in it, as in geometry, nothing but principles and deductions. The memory of recent oppression causes us to act as Tarquin did, and to level down the higher classes instead of elevating the inferior. Liberty and equality then govern by their negative side, instead of exercising the positive and beneficent influence they should have, to develop all forces to their utmost, to ennoble the mind, to give more elasticity to the soul and greater vigor to thought, to give birth to those varied forms and to that moral energy, which should bring us nearer to final equality in the bosom of God.(6) We forget that no one is born _free_, and that every one ought to endeavor to become so, Feindlich ist des Mannes Streben Mit zermalmender Gewalt Geht der Wilde durch des Leben Ohne Rast und Aufenthalt, —_Schiller_. and make himself worthy of liberty, by the exercise of manly virtue! Because the form has been changed, we believe that we have changed human nature. It is easy to understand, why, where these ideas prevail, the study of the past should be neglected and despised. Efforts are made to avoid it. Why, it is asked, revive memories of oppression and misery? The old world is wrecked. It is annihilated. Peace to its ashes! Or else, after it has been destroyed, it is sought for again; and, under pretext of eradicating the evils existing in it, an attack is made on the eternal basis on which human society rests, on the laws not made by man, and which it is not given to man to change. The world becomes one vast laboratory, in which the rashest experiments are multiplied in number, in which mankind is but clay in the hands of the potter which every pretended “thinker” may mould at will, by giving him the false appearances of independence and of an emancipated being.