11-17-38 DEAR LADY BLENNERHASSETT, IN your Frau von Staël we have the contribution of German historical scholarship to the Centenary of 1789. The following pages, in which I have endeavoured to test the ideas underlying the French Revolution by the "moral laws of nature and of nations," may, perhaps, serve, in some sort, to supplement your admirable volumes. However that may be, your kind permission to write your name here, enables me not only to pay a tribute to personal friendship, but to acknowledge the debt of gratitude laid upon me, as upon all scientific students of history throughout the world, by your masterly and monumental work. Most sincerely yours, ATHENEUM CLUB, LONDON. June 20th, 1889. W. S. LILLY. SUMMARY. CHAPTER I. THE REVOLUTIONARY DOGMA. The French Revolution of 1789-the Revolution of these latter days Importance of understanding it aright To obtain the instruction which is the true end of historical research, we must discern the ideas of which events are the phenomenal expression The public order which the Revolution destroyed, rested on the idea of divinely prescribed duty The Revolutionists attempted to rebuild it on the idea of political rights, attaching to man quà man PAGE 1 2 9 Their method social geometry 10 They applied this method to the speculations of Rousseau, and endeavoured to translate into institutions his Contrat Social . 11 These speculations postulate that men are absolutely equivalent, and that the will of the majority is the source and norm of all rights, 13 PAGE Substance of the Revolutionary dogma: that complete freedom, or rather lawlessness, is the natural condition of man; that all men are born and continue equal in rights; that civil society is an artificial state resting upon a contract between those sovereign units, whereby the native independence of each is surrendered, and an absolute, power over each is vested in the body politic; that human nature is good, and that the evil in the world is the result of bad education and bad institutions; that man, uncorrupted by civilisation, is essentially reasonable; and that the will of the sovereign units, dwelling in any territory under the social contract, that is of the majority of them, expressed by their delegates, is the supreme law Object of the present treatise: to examine the Revolution, after a century's experience of it, in its relation with Liberty, Religion, Science, Art, Democracy, and in its bearing on the public life of England 15 16 CHAPTER II. THE REVOLUTION AND LIBERTY. The Revolutionary dogma holds liberty to reside in political equality 17 A worthier conception of liberty will be set forth. Liberty is rooted in free will PAGE 18 18 Free will, concentrated in itself, is moral liberty, and is, in a sense, unlimited 18 But as soon as it manifests itself externally it becomes conditioned 19 And law, which is grounded in the self-same faculty of reason whence springs free agency, is the essential condition of its right use 19 Hence the necessity which compels men into the social state wherein liberty is realised 19 This truth was recognised by Aristotle and embodied in his Politics; he holds that man is a moral being and that only in a polity can justice be realised; that the state is an association of free persons, to be organised justly, and that its end is the higher life The statement of M. Fustel de Coulanges, that individual liberty was unknown in the ancient Hellenic republics, examined and dissented from . Those republics were the first missionaries of freedom in the Western world The political progress of Europe is the gradual vindication of the personal, social, and public prerogatives which make up individual freedom; the evolution of the individual in the social organism |