From this moment he treated the Holbachians--so he contemptuously styled the Encyclopaedists--as enemies of the human race and disseminators of the deadliest poisons.
This was no mere quarrel of rival authors.

It marked a fundamental divergence in thought, and proclaimed the beginning of a disastrous reaction in the very heart of the school of illumination.

Among the most conspicuous elements of the reaction were these: the subordination of reason to emotion; the displacement of industry, science, energetic and many-sided ingenuity, by dreamy indolence; and finally, what brings us back to our starting-point, the suppression of opinions deemed to be anti-social by the secular arm.

The old idea was brought back in a new dress; the absolutist conception of the function of authority, associated with a theistic doctrine.

Unfortunately for France, Rousseau's idea prospered, and ended by vanquishing its antagonist.