The criticism of religious beliefs has been developed and spread without giving too much offence to temporal power, thanks to the care taken by philosophers in general to reassure it upon the immediate consequences of their labours. Hobbes in the XVII. century, Voltaire in the XVIII. are as conservative from the political point of view as they are revolutionary from the religious point of view. The precaution was a very wise one on their part. But it did not arrest the consequences which arose from their principles. Critical philosophy, urging the dogma of the freedom of examination to the assault of all the principles of the established régime, shook and ruined them one after the other, until the “final explosion” of the French Revolution. This was the conclusion in fact of the long work of decomposition which had been going on during five centuries. The old régime was rotten; the Revolution overturned it, meaning to clear the ground. But did it lay down the basis of the régime which was to succeed this one? It did not, replies Comte with Saint-Simon and de Maistre. He admires the energy of the political gifts of the Convention. Nevertheless it was wrong in believing that “critical” principles could take the place and carry out the functions of “organic” principles. So long as the struggle lasted, the critical principles had been all the more effective in that they were credited with an absolute value. Thus the dogma of boundless liberty of conscience had served to destroy the spiritual power of the catholic clergy, the dogma of the sovereignty of the people to upset the temporal government, finally the dogma of natural equality to decompose the system of social classes. But, once the old régime was abolished the error of taking these dogmas as the basis of “reorganisation” was committed. It was not seen that they were incompatible not only with the régime which they had just destroyed, but _with any social system whatever_. In this way it is moral and political disorder which was upheld as the end of social perfection. For, each of the dogmas of the critical doctrine, when it is taken in an organic sense, “comes exactly to lay down as a principle that in this particular respect society _must not be organised_.”[313]