Excerpt from Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 3 of 6: The Reaction in France (1874)

The principle of authority has had a powerful educative in¿uence on the human race but its real mission is to make itself super¿uous. At a comparatively low stage man sub mits to law because it emanates from authority, at a higher, because he recognises its reasonableness. Where authority is absolute it must, and as a matter of fact does, demand recognition as something mysterious and miraculous, and treat all criticism as rebellion and heresy.

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