The variety of the grounds which were ascribed to morality is sufficient to betray the original flaw of such philosophy. Even Lord Shaftesbury had been unfaithful to Locke, mainly owing to his own strong sense of the æsthetic, but also owing to the unsuitability of the great philosopher’s doctrine, as it was understood then, as a basis for a theory of ethics. Thus Utilitarianism came into being. “The best for the greatest number,” was to remain as the ideal or ideology of Illuminism; and the best in question became more and more the material best, and less and less the moral best. After the natural sense of sociability which had taken the place of the will of God at the basis of the state, after the natural sense of right and wrong which had been elaborated as a substitute for the Decalogue, very little was left of the _tabula rasa_ idea of man’s soul upheld by Locke. All these natural senses were anterior to experience and when natural religion was added to them it was understood that all these innate faculties were constitutive of rationalness in practical life; and Nature was gradually opposed to history as rational to irrational. This natural religiousness had had its first English assertor in Herbert of Cherbury. To him man’s soul is far from being _tabula rasa_; it is a book that opens naturally and displays its hidden treasure. And John Toland, in his efforts to retrieve free thinking from the interference of the State, determines the limitation of the state’s jurisdiction, to which the citizen’s _actions_ must be subject but never his _opinions_; whilst he limited his request for tolerance for the benefit of that class of men whose social position enabled them to afford a sufficient culture to make a harmless use of such liberty. Then the negativeness of any liberal government was obvious, since in Toland’s notion of it it became like a simple set of brakes destined to act when the machine goes wrong and to keep the serene impossibility of an impeccable butler until order and peace are actually broken. Thus again the radical difference between educated and uneducated which had been fostered by the cultural movement of Humanism and Renaissance, assumed a religious and political significance which made the new idea of class a greater impediment to the self-making man than that of the feudal hierarchy which had always admitted the admission to knighthood of a valorous man whatever his condition. This cautious exclusion of the people from the new intellectual religion was a condemnation; the rational cult proved an artificial theory and could have no vitality. Yet it would be a perversion of facts to present it as due to the personal feeling of Toland or any other man. It was the consequence both of the predominance of Rational Reality in the systems then in honour, and of the traditional Humanism according to which there was the same difference between a scholar and a non-scholar as there had