fraternity; upon this, the rights of man and civil rights; and upon this, was established social legislation.
One objection has to be met despite all our methodological reserves. Was not and is not France, we shall be asked, preeminently the land of civilisation and culture; has not France become wealthy and economically progressive; was it not France that proclaimed the ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity; is not France republican?
France, like all Catholic countries, adopted the new progressive ideas in opposition to its Catholicism and despite its Catholicism; it was on the basis of such ideas that the modern development of France was upbuilded. Even during the first revolution, under the influence of these modern ideas, France cut herself completely adrift from the church, this severance being the most decisive and revolutionary expression of opposition to ecclesiastical religion. France attempted an ecclesiastical and political restoration, but revolution recurred again and again, so that France, in contradistinction to England, has become the typical land of revolution.
France is radical and revolutionary, but not democratic; not even the French republic is democratic per se. In like manner, whilst French philosophy developed into radical positivism, in the very founder of French positivism, in Auguste Comte, we may note the manner in which anti-ecclesiastical and antitheological positivism relapsed into mythopoeic fetichism. Positivism was radical, but it lacked the spirit of criticism.
German philosophy and English philosophy, on the other hand, are more critical, and consequently more stable; they are no less anti-ecclesiastical and antitheological; but they do not encounter in their respective churches the absolute hostility which thought has to encounter in France and in other Catholic lands. We need only compare Comte with John Stuart Mill. Comte relapses into fetichism; Mill, starting from a Comtist base, advances to nihilism. There has been an analogous political development in England and in Germany. England is nominally a monarchy, but is actually subject to an aristocratic oligarchy, whereas semicatholic Germany with its Prussian junkerdom is being steadily democratised. Germany has the most progressive and the strongest social democracy in Europe; in Germany, Bismarck, the most
