Bonald jeers at the witness of experience, scorns that of history--the lessons of experience are without significance to him who is in possession of the eternal, fundamental principles. Even natural history he will have nothing to do with, because in it he perceives the idea of evolution, which is of the evil one.
There is no such thing as historical evolution; there is historical tradition, and it is to this we must cling. For by means of tradition we reach God. In the chain of blind men which we call humanity only the first blind man requires a staff, and this staff is the commandment of God, which is transmitted by tradition.
The eighteenth century had placed more faith than any of its precursors in man's conscious capacity of invention and production. Rousseau maintained that it was man who invented and founded society. Bonald contests this theory. Man, he says, has invented nothing; he no more invented the family or society than he invented speech or writing. He was in the beginning the blank page, the _tabula rasa_, of which Condillac and the Sensationalists romanced--this blank page has not been filled with the impressions of the senses, but with the direct instructions of God.
For God was not merely the creator "in the beginning"; he continues to create to this very day. He founded society, and founded it that it might preserve his words and his thoughts. But this it can only do by preserving tradition unbroken.
The intention, the mission of tradition, then, is to keep God in the world. Hence every attempt to break with tradition is an attempt at spiritual suicide. And the endeavour to preserve tradition is simply aspiration after the full pulsation of life. A tenacious clinging to the purest spiritual inheritance produces the purest, fullest life. Therefore Bonald clings to the dogmas and to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic church.
In order to vindicate the doctrine of creation and continued creative acts in every domain of nature, he is obliged to prove the same immutability in the universe of which he is the advocate in politics; hence from the year 1800 onwards he is perpetually attacking what was a comparatively new thing in those days, the doctrine of evolution. Like Voltaire before him and Disraeli after him, he makes merry over the idea of man being descended from a fish.