[212] Benjamin Constant is a notable instance of the want of staunchness of too many French writers. At first strongly against the Empire, he was won over by the uncle far more easily than poor Prévost-Paradol was by the nephew.
[213] Witness the cruel exactions, at Compiègne (Pall Mall Gazette, 11th March) and elsewhere, during the armistice and after the conclusion of peace.
[214] The hatred is reciprocated. Germany does not forget French occupation. An eminent German remarked to us the other day that more than a dozen Prussian towns are still paying the interest of the money borrowed to pay the first Napoleon's exactions. He remarked, too, on the cruelties which the French practised; and said that Germany remembers Davoust at Hamburg, and his turning out 26,000 people on New Year's-day to perish in the cold, because they could not show that they had a sufficient stock of siege provisions.
[215] Yet the clergy, as might be predicted from the fulsomeness of their homage, only flattered Napoleon for their own ends. They soon showed their ingratitude. Pradt, Archbishop of Mechlin, invented the epithet, Jupiter-Scapin. Talleyrand did his best to pull down the falling Empire. The peasantry whom they had taught were less fickle.
[216] A curiosity in the history of Catechisms is that in use in Spain while Napoleon was extolled as God's image on earth in the neighbouring country. Therein young Spaniards were taught as follows: 'Tell me, my child, who are you?'—'A Spaniard, by the grace of God.' 'Who is the enemy of our happiness?'—'The Emperor of the French.' 'How many natures hath he?'—'Two; the human and the diabolical.'—Mignet, vol. ii. 336.
[217] Scrutator has tried to prove that it was really Prussia, and not France, which made war inevitable.
[218] Of the sad civil war in the capital we would only say that it is partly due to the want of a proper Poor Law, partly to the justly bitter feeling caused by the hard terms of peace—terms so different from those of 1815, which secured fifty years' peace, and eventually made France and England friends.
[219] It is needless to enumerate the number of English essays and books upon Berkeley and his philosophy which have recently appeared. It may not be so well known to our readers that Berkeley's doctrines are at present very widely discussed in Germany. A great deal of this discussion is doubtless due to the exertions of that fervid Berkeleian, Dr. T. Collyns Simon, who, according to a German critic, 'reist in Deutschland umher, um mit allen Mitteln des Worts und der Schrift, propaganda für seinen Meister zu machen;' but the interest shown on the subject must rest on a deeper basis. Of German dissertations on Berkeley we have seen the following:—R. Hoppe in Bergman's Zeitschrift, v. Heft. 2. 1870; Freiherr v. Reichlin-Meldegg, in Fichte's Zeitschrift, lvi. Heft. 2, 1870; T. Collyns Simon and H. Ulrici, in Fichte's Zeitschrift, lvii. Heft. 1; and F. Friederich's Ueber Berkeley's Idealismus, 1870. To these must be added, as the most important of all, Prof. F. Ueberweg's translation of Berkeley's 'Principles of Human Knowledge,' with a short preface and some very valuable notes, published in Heimann's cheap series of philosophical works, Berlin, 1869. The growing interest felt in Berkeley is also to be seen in the larger amount of space given to the criticism of his doctrines in the more recent work on the history of philosophy, such as Freiherr v. Reichlin-Meldegg's Einleitung zur Philosophie, Wien, 1870.
[220] We use the word 'Idealist' in the modern German sense. It is the technical term to denote that tendency in human speculation which is embodied in Plato's Dialectic, Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, Hegel's metaphysical logic, or Ferrier's scorn for Psychology, and is opposed to 'Realist,' which is applied to Herbart's Metaphysic, Mill's Ethics, or Buckle's History of Civilization; cf. Dr. F. Ueberweg on 'Idealism, Realism, and Ideal-Realism,' in Fichte's Zeitschrift, vol. 34.
[221] The writer of an article on the Idealism of Berkeley and Collier, in the North British Review, January, 1871, summarizes forcibly the arguments against Berkeley which have been urged by the so-called school of Natural Realists. It is evidently an attempt to show that the theories of Berkeley and Collier are incompatible with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and therefore, the writer thinks, with that of Transubstantiation also.