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But if we approach these three fundamental ideas with the probe of scientific criticism, and resolutely tear away the halo of the absolute, it does not on that account seem necessary for us to declare that they are valueless or even harmful in life. We read Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and put it down perhaps with the conviction that the usually recognised sources of inspired information as to revealed religion and the divine mission of Christianity are an unskilful compilation of purely apocryphal documents; but are we on that account to deny the importance of Judaism and Christianity in social progress and ethics? Or again, I may read E. B. Tyler’s Primitive Culture and see the ideas of the soul and God arise from purely natural and (for the most part) physiological origins, just as we can trace the development of the skilful hand of Raphael or Liszt from the fore-limbs of an ape; but am I from that to conclude that the idea of religion is harmful to society? It is just the same with the ideas of the State and Property. Modern science has shown us beyond dispute the purely historical origin of both these forms of social life; and both are, at least as we find them to-day, comparatively recent features of human society. This, of course, settles the question as to the State and Property being inviolable, or being necessary features of human society from everlasting to everlasting; but the further question as to how far these forms are advantages and relatively necessary for society in general, or for a certain society, has nothing to do with the above, and cannot be answered by the help of a simple logical formula. But though this fact seems so clear to us, it is even to-day not by any means clear to a great portion of mankind. And how much less clear it must have been to thinkers at the beginning of this century when thought was still firmly moulded upon the conception of the Absolute. To them there could only be either absolute Being or absolute Not-Being; and as soon as ever critical philosophy destroyed the idea of the “sacredness” of the institutions referred to (Property and the State), it was almost unavoidable that it should declare them to be “unholy,” i. e., radically bad and harmful. The logic which underlies this process of thought is similar to that which concludes that if a thing is not white it must be black. But it cannot be denied that just at this time—during the celebrated dix ans after the Revolution of July—many circumstances seemed positively to favour such an inference.