Hence, a natural inclination to devote our faculty to the forces within our control, and to withdraw it from vain industry about forces--if they be forces--which are beyond our control and beyond our apprehension.

Thus man becomes the centre of the world to himself, nature his servant and minister, human society the field of his interests and his exertions.

The sensational psychology, again, whether scientifically defensible or not, clearly tends to heighten our idea of the power of education and institutions upon character.

The more vividly we realise the share of external impressions in making men what they are, the more ready we shall be to concern ourselves with external conditions and their improvement.

The introduction of the positive spirit into the observation of the facts of society was not to be expected until the Cartesian philosophy, with its reliance on inexplicable intuitions and its exaggeration of the method of hypothesis, had been laid aside.
Diderot struck a key-note of difference between the old Catholic spirit and the new social spirit, between quietist superstition and energetic science, in the casual sentence in his article on alms-houses and hospitals: "_It would be far more important to work at the prevention of misery, than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable_." It is very easy to show that the Encyclopaedists had not established an impregnable scientific basis for their philosophy.