Instead of courting doubt as if it had worth in itself, the English may be said on the whole to have courted candour. Candour does not exclude doubt, but it is never merely negative, and for this reason it is peculiarly normal and wholesome, although of course having its own dangers. To be candid, in the [p.271] sense of the word here intended, is to accept what is, which in lack of a better term we may call nature, and to insist only on seeing this, and living up to it, deeply and fully. The doubting French have appealed to truth and righteousness or reality as only an innate conviction, and so have easily missed the possible realism of such conviction. Descartes made just such an appeal, and though he did indeed gain, or rather regain, a real world, the reality did not quite receive even from him, as we have seen, its full due of closeness and intimacy with human life. Rousseau, later, made the same appeal, finding his own personal will intrinsically good, but his philosophy, though a passionate, uncontrolled belief in reality, was taken, not unnaturally, as a call to revolution. But the simple, candid English, on their side of the Channel, have appealed, not primarily to anything abstractly within the self, not to a mere ideal or sentiment or subjective belief, but to reality embodied and palpable--in a word, to nature, the great all-inclusive sphere of candid experience. In France, again, nature has failed ever to be a thoroughly practical thing, a positive, directly interesting, wholly pertinent situation. It has been a cry, of course, sometimes of alarm, sometimes of hope; a great enthusiasm, too; a dream; an ideal--if not unideal--substitute for the present life; a sphere often, too often, quite opposed to God and government and organized society; but never, or almost never, a present responsibility to be clearly recognized and calmly measured; never, or almost never, a part and parcel of the present life; never, or almost never, something that lives in and [p.272] through God and government and society. In England, on the other hand, so differently, if Bacon and Locke and Berkeley and even David Hume may be trusted; if Shakespeare and Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Hobbes and Burke and Blackstone, or Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are representative; in England nature has ever been very real and very present; not outside of manifest English life, but actually incorporated in it. How else understand English deism; the _laissez faire_ economics; the peculiar nature and growth of the English constitution; the pragmatism of English science; the sun-warmed atmosphere of English literature; the nature-homage and bodily vigour of English recreation? How else account for the English people's progressive conservatism?