272 F. WINTEKTON I

excesses. The too zealous opponents of the fashionable system then abroad did not always discern what they ought to assail in preference, and how to assail it ; and they often battered at the strongest points of the theory as fiercely as at the weakest. Theses were even published, in which it was stated that to affirm the existence of atoms was to commit the crime of heresy ! It was all of no avail. Cartesianism answered to a want of the human mind the want of novelty. Men were tired of hearing the same eternal theses eternally attacked and eternally defended by the same objections and the same proofs. It was as idle to attempt a successful stand against a system which rightly or wrongly professed to supply that want as to stop a mighty wind in its onward course. Had the Jesuits been as wise then as it is easy to be now after the event, they would have endeavoured to meet the public demand by other and more striking novelties, not inconsistent with faith. A negative position, a mere denial, is always dis- advantageous ; and in this case it had the peculiar disad- vantage of engendering new enmities : the Jesuits had already enough of old ones. They had now to do with four sorts of adversaries, if not more, in the field of speculation alone. From the first, Protestants were their natural enemies. Their controversies with the partisans of Baius and of Jansenius had created others, no less implacable and no less ardent than the first. The whole Order of St. Dominic was, to a man, inflamed with burning zeal (none the less earnest for being kept down by the commands of the Holy See) against that upstart Society that had shown itself able to hold its own in presence of their invincible expounders. And Cartesians of every sort, from the most moderate to the most extreme, were deeply offended at the sudden change of front which the Jesuits had just effected. Then Voltaire appeared. The first thirty years of the 18th century were thus com- pletely taken up with struggles in the intellectual sphere, even before the last-named combatant entered the arena ; afterwards, the conflict became still fiercer and more difficult to sustain. " Qui trop embrasse, mal etreint," says the French proverb ; and it would seem that the Jesuits, in their ambition of universal activity, had not sufficiently reckoned what amount of intellectual power could be expected of a small body that never counted more than from ten to fifteen thousand effective members. Moreover, the 18th century is notable by a marked absence of philosophical talent amongst them. The decree of the sixteenth General