in France was reinforced by that of Hume, who lived for a time in France and was personally
acquainted with many of the leading savants.
The chief transmitter of English influence to France was Voltaire.
In England, the philosophical followers of Locke, until the French Revolution, took no interest
in his political doctrines. Berkeley was a bishop not much interested in politics; Hume was a
Tory who followed the lead of Bolingbroke. England was politically quiescent in their time, and
a philosopher could be content to theorize without troubling himself about the state of the
world. The French Revolution changed this, and forced the best minds into opposition to the
status quo. Nevertheless, the tradition in pure philosophy remained unbroken. Shelley Necessity
of Atheism, for which he was expelled from Oxford, is full of Locke's influence. *
Until the publication of Kant Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it might have seemed as if the
older philosophical tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were being definitely overcome
by the newer empirical method. This newer method, however, had never prevailed in German
universities, and after 1792 it was held responsible for the horrors of the Revolution. Recanting
revolutionaries such as Coleridge found in Kant an intellectual support for their opposition to
French atheism. The Germans, in their resistance to the French, were glad to have a German
philosophy to uphold them. Even the French, after the fall of Napoleon, were glad of any
weapon against Jacobinism. All these factors favoured Kant.
Kant, like Darwin, gave rise to a movement which he would have detested. Kant was a liberal, a
democrat, a pacifist, but those who professed to develop his philosophy were none of these
things. Or, if they still called themselves Liberals, they were Liberals of a new species. Since
Rousseau and Kant, there have been two schools of liberalism, which may be distinguished as
the hard-headed and the soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo,
and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte,
Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler. This statement, of course, is too schematic to be
quite true,
* Take, e.g., Shelley's dictum: "When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the
agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed."