"Our nation," he says, "singularly eager as it is for novelties in all matters of taste, is in matters of science extremely attached to old opinions." This remark remains true of France to the present hour, and it would be an interesting digression, did time allow, to consider its significance.

France can at all events count one master innovator, the founder of Cartesianism himself.

D'Alembert points out that the disciples violate the first maxims of their chief.

He describes the hypothesis of vortices and the doctrine of innate ideas as no longer tenable, and even as ridiculous; but do not let us forget, he says with a fine movement of candour, that it was Descartes who opened the way; he who set an example to men of intelligence, of shaking off the yoke of scholasticism, of opinion, of authority--in a word, of prejudices and barbarism.

Those who remain faithful to his hypothetical system, while they abandon his method, may be the last of his partisans, but they would assuredly never have been the first of his disciples.
By system the Encyclopaedists meant more or less coherent bodies of frivolous conjecture.