The first systematizers of morals in
Christian Europe, on any other than a purely theological basis, the
writers on International Law, reasoned wholly from these premises, and
transmitted them to a long line of successors. This mode of thought
reached its culmination in Rousseau, in whose hands it became as
powerful an instrument for destroying the past, as it was impotent for
directing the future. The complete victory which this philosophy gained,
in speculation, over the old doctrines, was temporarily followed by an
equally complete practical triumph, the French Revolution: when, having
had, for the first time, a full opportunity of developing its
tendencies, and showing what it could not do, it failed so conspicuously
as to determine a partial reaction to the doctrines of feudalism and
Catholicism. Between these and the political metaphysics (meta-politics
as Coleridge called it) of the Revolution, society has since oscillated;
raising up in the process a hybrid intermediate party, termed
Conservative, or the party of Order, which has no doctrines of its own,
but attempts to hold the scales even between the two others, borrowing
alternately the arguments of each, to use as weapons against whichever
of the two seems at the moment most likely to prevail.
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