The philosophy of the seventeenth century had, however, made this consistency of theory and practice an obviously unrealisable chimera for the men of the eighteenth century, and whilst French rationalism brought people to think of rational theories as capable of radically reforming society, English empiricism held that ideas may work very well in theory and very badly in practice. Such a distinction was the source of great difficulties. If thought and action were the terms of an irreductible dualism it was natural to say Meliora video; deteriora sequor. Indeed, the moral imperative of Kant could not be reached on such ground and in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century moral treatises and dissertations take such a place that there is no doubt as to the men of the period realising the difficulties of the problem. They had separated religion from philosophy, religion from law and politics, and as they had the _jus naturale_ they must have natural morals. A sense of right and wrong due to the natural light granted to man by God was to be found in Scholasticism as the natural tendency to sociability already mentioned. It could, in fact, be traced to the Stoic school and even farther back. But this did not make things easier to the people who held positive religions to be useless, whilst on the other hand they were ready to admit their value as establishments providing for the moral care of the lower classes. In their abstention from history, the only use of churches they could see was to curb the egoistical tendencies of man in the classes which were denied the enlightenment that could provide educated people with principles of discrimination between right and wrong. They could not realise that this function of the churches is merely a consequence of the position of the believer towards his divinity, that such a position brings man to realise what is to him not-self, thereby giving to the moral law the objectivity which alone can free it from the constant alteration of selfish motives, and bestow the stability necessary to its efficiency.