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ESSAYS ON LIBER TV
reformer in the era of repentant monarchy, were vitiated and frustrated by want of adaptation to custom, Common party divisions represented nothing scientific to his mind. and he was willing, like De Quincey, to accept them as corresponding halves of a necessary \vhole. He wished that he knew half as much as his neighbour, Mrs. Somerville; but he possessed no natural philosophy, and never acquired the emancipating habit which comes from a life spent in securing progress by shutting one's eyes to the past. "AIle vVissenschaft steht und ruht auf ihrer historischen Ent\vicklung, sie lebt von ihrer traditionellen Vergangenheit, wie der Baum von seiner Wurzel." He was moved, not by the gleam of reform after the conclave of Pius IX., but by Pius VII. The impression made upon him by the character of that pope, and his resistance to Napoleon, had much to do \vith his resolution to become a priest. He took orders in the Church in the days of revival, as it issued from oppression and the eclipse of hierarchy; and he entered its service in the spirit of Sailer, Cheverus, and Doyle. The mark of that time never left him. When Newman asked him what he would say of the Pope's journey to Paris, for the coronation of the emperor, he hardly recognised the point of the question. He opposed, in 1853, the renewal of that precedent; but to the end he never felt what people mean \vhen they remark on the proximity of Notre-Dame to Vincennes. Döllinger was too much absorbed in distant events to be always a close observer of what \vent on near him; and he \vas, therefore, not so much influenced by contact with contemporary history as men \vho \vere less entirely at home in other centuries. He knew about all that could be known of the ninth: in the nineteenth his superiority deserted him. Though he informed himself assiduously his thoughts were not there. He collected from Hormayr, Rado\vitz, Capponi, much secret matter of the last generation; and \vhere Brewer had told him about Oxford, and Plantier about Louis Philippe, there were landmarks J as when l{noblecher, the missionary, set down
