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The _eighteenth_
century saw a new revival: the world had become a man; great progress was
reported in arts, in inventions, and in discoveries; science began to
labor at the arduous but important task of classification; new theories of
government and laws were propounded; the past was consulted that its
experience might be applied; the partisan chronicles needed to be united
and compared that truth might be elicited; the philosophic historian was
required, and the people were ready to learn, and to criticize, what he
produced.
I have ventured to call this the Sceptical Age. It had other
characteristics: this was one. We use the word sceptical in its
etymological sense: it was an age of inquiry, of doubt to be resolved.
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot had founded a new
school of universal inquiry, and from their bold investigations and
startling theories sprang the society of the _illuminati_, and the race of
thinkers. They went too far: they stabbed the truth as it lay in the grasp
of error.


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