revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected
by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the
other "classic philosophers" of the first third of the century
orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was
no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who
passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of
the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a
philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme
intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism;
and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor
was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious
irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of
faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by
Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and
at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent
minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet. [1964]
The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though
he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of
Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the
ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy,
an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté
des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up,
[1965] and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the
orthodox. "God," he wrote, [1966] "interposes as little in the regular
development of humanity as in the course of the solar system." He
added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he
verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination
presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual,
between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On
another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their
appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of
pronouncing on religious questions. [1967]