of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous
centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic
views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the
phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring
masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of
some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance
of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious
systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized
world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have
thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with
a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey,
then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question
will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of
thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special
aspects of the culture process.
This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to
be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men
who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type
among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen
combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in
the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been
made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for
the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first
who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed
the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such
a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical
period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the
Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket,
and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience
a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The
anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic,
was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for
his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the
sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously
punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland,
[1674] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by
deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's Apology in reply only served
to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes
who would not otherwise have heard of them. [1675] All the while,
direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as
well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion,
and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been
great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer's Principles
of Nature; and Volney's Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's
Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of
d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; [1676]
that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of
Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle
in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.