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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION
were rescued from their ruins. For the vulgar, the old discredited God with all his threadbare paraphernalia, was again allowed to rule ; the intellectual elite, however, had become too sophisticated to relapse into crude belief, severely shaken, if not thoroughly explodied, by science. For their edification, religion appeared in the new garb of modern idealist philosophy. The untcnable doctrine of a personal creator was replaced by the fascinating fantasy of the Absolute Idea. The bitterest critic of the Christian Church, the cynical Voltaire, himself became an advocate of the lost cause, and replied the atheism of the philosopher Pierre Bayle with the following argument : “ If there is no God, we must discover one. Give Bayle five hundred peasants to rule, and he will immediately recognise the usefulness of religion.” That was the most forceful argument against the case in the defense of which it was advanced. It showed up God and religion in their true role. A few decades later, Kant did not blush to proclaim that he must set aside science in order to make room for faith. Yet, his “all-shattering” critical philosophy has swept away all the debris of medieval speculation. His monumental work on the theory of Newton had driven God away even from the precarious position conceded by the latter.
If the selfish interest of the bourgeoisie came in conflict with the philosophical revolution, and sought to curb its progress, the future of mankind
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