tions of theology, and the practical foundations of theocracy. Hume and Kant have revolutionised the minds of believers once for all.
Marx and his successors are right in proclaiming philosophy and science to be essentially revolutionary; but they are wrong when they endeavour to limit the revolutionary spirit to atheism and materialism or to certain specified sciences (they speak of the natural sciences, but we may remember that F. A. Lange regarded moral statistics as the most revolutionary of all the sciences). The philosophic revolution consists in the recognition of the futility of mythology, in the growth of a critical self-consciousness. Atheistic and materialistic negation is the ephemeral and purely negative form of this revolution.
During and after the French revolution, many philosophers, jurists, and students of political science, endeavoured to define the essence of that movement. Peculiarly instructive are the writings of the adversaries of the revolution: in France, de Maistre, and the philosophers of the restoration, de Bonald, Ballanche, etc.; in England, Burke; in Germany, Baader, Görres, Stahl, such converts to Catholicism as Schlegel, and the Metternichian publicists, led by Gentz.
I am in accord with the analysis furnished by these reactionaries. From their stately series I may select the Prussian court publicist Stahl, an eye witness and analyst of the revolution of 1848. Stahl rightly recognised that the revolution was not an isolated act, but a permanent state from which the new order was to spring. "Revolt, expulsion of dynasties, overthrow of constitutions, have occurred in all ages. The revolution is the characteristic, world-wide, and historical signature of our own epoch." Stahl is right, again, when he refers the revolution to an attempt "to base the whole of public life upon the will of man instead of upon God's ordinance and disposition." Stahl is right, finally, when he proclaims rationalism in religion to be the original cause of revolution.[1]
Though I agree with Stahl upon these points, I differ from him in that what he censures as "the extremity of sin in the political domain, . . . the essential defiance of God's ordinance, . . . the counter-belief in man rather than God," seems to me thoroughly justifiable.
Like Stahl and the before-mentioned philosophers and
- ↑ Stahl, What is the Revolution? (1852).
