The speeches delivered by members of the Assembly show how profound were these illusions. When the peasants began to burn the chateaux they were greatly astonished, and addressed them in sentimental harangues, praying them to cease, in order not to ``give pain to their good king,'' and adjured them ``to surprise him by their virtues.'' 2. Illusions respecting the Possibility of separating Man from his Past and the Power of Transformation attributed to the Law. One of the principles which served as a foundation for the revolutionary institutions was that man may readily be cut off from his past, and that a society may be re-made in all its parts by means of institutions. Persuaded in the light of reason that, except for the primitive ages which were to serve as models, the past represented an inheritance of errors and superstitions, the legislators of the day resolved to break entirely with that past. The better to emphasise their intention, they founded a new era, transformed the calendar, and changed the names of the months and seasons. Supposing all men to be alike, they thought they could legislate for the human race. Condorcet imagined that he was expressing an evident truth when he said: ``A good law must be good for all men, just as a geometrical proposition is true for all.'' The theorists of the Revolution never perceived, behind the world of visible things, the secret springs which moved them. A century of biological progress was needed to show how grievous were their mistakes, and how wholly a being of whatever species depends on its past. With the influence of the past, the reformers of the Revolution were always clashing, without ever understanding it. They wanted to annihilate it, but were annihilated by it instead. The faith of law-makers in the absolute power of laws and institutions, rudely shaken by the end of the Revolution, was absolute at its outbreak. Gregoire said from the tribune of the Constituent Assembly, without provoking the least astonishment: ``We could if we would change religion, but we do not want to.'' We know that they did want to later, and we know how miserably their attempt failed. Yet the Jacobins had in their hands all the elements of success. Thanks to the completest of tyrannies, all obstacles were removed, and the laws which it pleased them to impose were always accepted. After ten years of violence, of destruction and burning and pillage and massacre and general upheaval, their impotence was revealed so startlingly that they fell into universal reprobation. The dictator then invoked by the whole of France was obliged to re-establish the greater part of that which had been destroyed. The attempt of the Jacobins to re-fashion society in the name of pure reason constitutes an experiment of the highest interest. Probably mankind will never have occasion to repeat it on so vast a scale.