What a wonderful confidence, at first inexplicable, which assume with regard to man an idea which we no longer hold. Man, indeed, was regarded as essentially good and reasonable.--Rational, that is to say, capable of assenting to a plain obvious principle, of following an ulterior chain of argument, of understanding and accepting the final conclusion, of extracting for himself, on the occasion calling for it, the varied consequences to which it leads: such is the ordinary man in the eyes of the writers of the day; they judged him by themselves. To them the human intellect is their own, the classic intellect. For a hundred and fifty years it ruled in literature, in philosophy, in science, in education, in conversation, by virtue of tradition, of usage and of good taste. No other was tolerated and no other was imagined; and if, within this closed circle, a stranger succeeds in introducing himself, it is on condition of adopting the oratorical idiom which the raison raisonnante imposes on all its guests, on Greeks, Englishmen, barbarians, peasants and savages, however different from each other and however different they may be amongst themselves. In Buffon, the first man, on narrating the first hours of his being, analyses his sensations, emotions and impulses, with as much subtlety as Condillac himself. With Diderot, Otou the Tahitian, with Bernardin de St. Pierre, a semi-savage Hindu and an old colonist of the Ile-de-France, with Rousseau a country vicar, a gardener and a juggler, are all accomplished conversationalists and moralists. In Marmontel and in Florian, in all the literature of inferior rank preceding or accompanying the Revolution, also in the tragic or comic drama, the chief talent of the personage, whoever he may be, whether an uncultivated rustic, tattooed barbarian or naked savage, consists in being able to explain himself, in arguing and in following an abstract discourse with intelligence and attention, in tracing for himself, or in the footsteps of a guide, the rectilinear pathway of general ideas. Thus, to the spectators of the eighteenth century, Reason is everywhere and she stands alone in the world. A form of intellect so universal necessarily strikes them as natural, they resemble people who, speaking but one language, and one they have always spoken with facility, cannot imagine another language being spoken, or that they may be surrounded by the deaf and the dumb. And so much the more in as much as their theory authorizes this prejudice. According to the new ideology all minds are within reach of all truths. If the mind does not grasp them the fault is ours in not being properly prepared; it will comprehend if we take the trouble to guide it properly. For it has senses the same as our own; and sensations, revived, combined and noted by signs, suffice to form "not only all our conceptions but again all our faculties."[3406] An exact and constant relationship of ideas